Wordless Wednesday: Our Day of the Dead ofrenda

The whole shebang

Gavin and his mother, Frances.

My Grandmother, who, at 103.5, outlived my husband.

One widow’s mother-in-law story, part 7, reflections (the last one, I promise!)

(If you really want to start at part one, I started this story back in May. [Yes, May of "this year!"])

The story of my late mother-in-law and how I cared for her after my husband died has been drawn out nearly as long as I possibly can. But the more I hear myself tell it – now that it’s over, two years later, now that she's really, truly dead (remember that she wanted me gone instead of her son, and to steal my child) – the more I learn about my first loss, and the one before that, and the ones when I was young. At least one of these bears telling through the lens of Audrey.

I’ve written about how hard it is to care for someone who doesn’t want to be cared for, and who doesn’t have long to live anyway, compared to a youngish, healthy man with a child and much more to live for, and compared to caring for a child who is purely on the up-and-up. I’ve shared how I feel the system of protecting our rights harms elders, creating paradoxes that our independence shouldn’t be expected to resolve.

I haven’t really ruminated much about what older folks, including widows what seems like a few years older than my group, face when they lose a partner: a wall, a future that’s shorter, their own mortality. I know Gavin and I couldn’t face it with his diagnosis, with failing treatments, with rapid decline. Death is not something you can look at: it’s too large. And what does that look like when you’re in your eighties or older? As a young widow, I’m grateful that it’s obvious to everyone I have many good years left, even if that isolated me from every single human I met while I was grieving. Maybe, even looking at Audrey, I still can't think too much about this. Others can, and I envy them.

I lost something else. I haven’t mentioned, not much, that Audrey and I had, apart from the end-stage Oedipal conflict, a warm relationship. One Valentine’s Day years back I gushed that she’d been nicer to me than my own parents, and in some ways, on some days, it was true. We were both completely “out of it,” as they say, after Gavin died. What a hole he left in our lives, how little we thought of our lives in those moments that lasted for months. But her dementia did more than distance her and stress me: it meant that I lost the possibility of her comfort and the chance to help her cope with the loss, too. We were robbed of a chance to grieve together, to live through the first year and the second year, too, as any sort of family.

Now that I know more about grieving families, I suppose all I missed during that time was the chance to have her judge me more (when in fact, she barely understood any of the things I was doing, as she forgot the world and its workings). I didn’t get the delicious opportunity to have her judge my dating. Strangely enough, even as I burned everything, she was too messed up to even criticize my cooking.

I learned, too, that grieving is a learning process: my daughter and I were on the upswing in life – we had to go on – and so each day of grief was like a lesson. Since Audrey’s couldn’t remember things, she couldn’t learn. Did she not experience the grief or did it just go nowhere, into depression and continued decline?

And there’s another insight about letting go. After she died, I held on to her notes, pages and pages of scribbled phone numbers with too few or too many disordered digits, questions to herself about whose name was what, the script declining and precipitously disobeying the fair blue rules on notepaper of every conceivable kind. Countless letters were drafted, front and back, to the editor of everything asking to be set free from involuntary captivity. Lack of comprehension abounded, and it seemed all the paper stayed balled up together in her purse or photo album, among sugar packets, none of them ever sent.

I wanted to save it all. I felt I needed evidence. I wanted forgiveness, an excuse, something to help me explain (to Gavin?) some vague day why I had to put her in the nice apartment and then later, in the nicer dementia ward. Even when the cousin from Ohio was responsible, it was clear I was still the “local relative,” I was the one the staff saw. There were ways in which I felt still responsible, even though I know I was off the hook. It was, after all, me that they called at 4:00 a.m. one night to tell me she was in a diabetic coma with blood sugar of 13 and that I should not request that she be sent to the hospital (of course I called the cousin).

I craved the evidence of her disease. But Mr. Fresh, who accompanied me to identify her body, who had never met her, was wise. He made me throw the papers, envelopes and sheaves of scribbly torn crazy pages, out. That’s not how you want Short Stack to remember her grandmother, he said. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone.

He was right. There is no audit for grief, and no standards in the large areas of action – outside of medicine – that we call “caregiving” and “managing care” that’s done by family. Audrey received the best care, later than she should have, but earlier than anyone else would have arranged. She probably lived longer for my assistance. And by the time she died I no longer felt I had to do it “for Gavin,” or the way he wanted. I had let go of those ideas at last and that marked some kind of change. In my new life, I strive to be less lawyerly. It's not that hard a habit to lose.

About Short Stack: although losing her Grandma did happen when she was older, closer to understanding loss, it didn’t seem to affect her any more than losing Daddy did. It gave her some new questions and then some new understanding, but she “got” more of Grandma’s illness. Over the course of the next year, as she learned about nutrition and avoiding apple juice, she seemed to be able to absorb that Grandma had died because she didn’t eat and drink enough. Shortie’s life was not framed by two losses: it was built of memories, like her last date with Grandma playing catch with a pink balloon in her nice bedroom on the dementia ward.

My last impression is of identifying the body, frail and pale, eye black like a panda’s from falling against a doorknob. A duty that hospice, who shot a Polaroid as they admitted Gavin, had saved me in the first case. I felt like steel next to her cold body in that large empty room, crossing the inlaid marble floor, in the midday. She was like a queen there and I was doing my job.

The cousin and I organized a memorial service – at which I didn’t tell anyone I was engaged to Mr. Fresh, even informally – and that was the last time I saw some of Gavin’s dearest friends, just a dozen people showed up including several of the old ladies who’d shared our vacations.

And to be honest, after everything, it was hard to be sad for any of that loss. Audrey had had a better life than she'd ever expected -- she had the satisfaction of dying with her secrets untold (probably unremembered) -- and she didn't know she was on the way out. It was a simple relief and one less weekly duty and with the second anniversary of Gavin's death coming up, I needed all the breaks I could get. Audrey wouldn't have understoodd my remarriage. She wasn't coming with me into my new life.


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One widow’s mother-in-law story, part 6

(...continued)

This mother-in-law thing is turning into a very long story. But in many ways, the story of my mother-in-law is most of what happened during that first tough year after my husband died. What else did was going on? A job, a child, lots of laundry. I wasn’t bored, but I was numb and my responsibilities overpowered me. When I let go of caring for Audrey, I had to start looking ahead.

It wasn’t that the grief hit me all of a sudden – it had been there all year, gnawing at me every free minute and punching me down occasionally. Like Audrey, the grief was something to work on; unlike her, thinking and feeling did make a difference. And while most of it seemed to hurt, as people in grief all know, we’re not ill and we don’t need to be fixed. The only way out is through.

Life during the first year wasn’t all gray. There were many laughs with my new, young widow friends in group. My daughter was adjusting to day care, reveling in playing with kids her age all day and growing, growing, growing. We had high points, delights, and many, many tantrums, and we still visited my mother-in-law in her new “home.”

In brief: Audrey had seven good months in this facility, which she never got used to. She’d call me frequently asking when we were leaving “the hotel,” and occasionally she seemed upset to be there, but she was receiving the smallest amount of care possible for her abilities and it wasn’t too expensive. We visited and did craft projects. I fantasized that it was a good place for her to get used to and live well for a while.

I suppose in retrospect I should have been sharper about detecting changes in her. One memorable morning she called me thirty times before 9:15 promising to break out of the home. Each message told me her plan: eat breakfast, pack things, and then run away from this awful place. Each call was a new experience for her, and some of the calls were adjusted for the fact that she’d already eaten breakfast. I thought it was humorous and a sign of her insanity and inability to carry anything out, but not necessarily a mark of how far her dementia had progressed. Obviously, grief was making a lunkhead out of me, too.

I told my daughter, over and over, that Grandma was sick. Audrey, I said, had a problem in her head which sometimes made her think that I was in charge of everything in the world, and also, she had to be in a special place so they could make sure she ate and drank enough healthy water. My girl was fine with it and guided me through my duty to keep visiting though I would have loved to abandon the old woman altogether. I was so thankful to not be in charge and remembering that weight kept me doing the least (really the least) I could. After all, the woman I’d come to know and value as family – the self-sufficient and generous mother of my husband – wasn’t there any more.

She was no longer maternal, I had become the parent of everyone around me. One anchor was gone, replaced by a giant weight as I tried to lead my little girl through each day’s fog. It was never a problem; she danced ahead of me.

One Saturday afternoon in October, when Shortie and I were on a church camping trip, Audrey broke her hip. This event --- the stress, the hospital visit, the surgery – precipitated my first Match.com relationship in all its exhilaration and hilarity. All four days of it.

Some statistics you always keep in the back of your head, vaguely: how many seniors die within a year of breaking a hip. How many people, after widowhood, die within a year of their spouse. After the broken hip, I knew Audrey’s clock was ticking. When she at last died, six months after the last move, her mind was nearly gone. Her final home was the dementia ward of a real nursing home (the previous facility had been transitional and only offered very limited care).

Audrey died holding secrets that I was hoping to untangle from her: I think this was part of why I saved her tchotches, especially the New Mexico ones (I still have them). After she died I found out that even her best friends, the sisters of her generation while she was raising Gavin alone, were as much in the dark as I was.

She had lasted nearly two years after Gavin died. Some of Gavin’s friends thought, like I did, that she’d only be around a year beyond him, and that was when we thought her abilities were greater than they were. Fortunately, finally, I’d outlived her. I knew that my daughter and I would make it.



(to be continued... but not much longer, promise!)

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One widow’s mother-in-law story, part 5

(...continued)

How was I liberated from caring for Audrey? Gavin’s cousin from Ohio – Audrey’s niece, her sister-in-law’s daughter – was the only other person alive with any interest in her well-being. I spoke to her every few weeks on the phone, and updated her on how badly the old lady was doing. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t take over. I was doing so badly, and so was Audrey.

Finally one day the cousin planned a trip East to take over managing some of the care and stated, “it was getting pretty depressing hearing you talk about how badly you all were doing.” Thank you, I thought. And also? Duh! That’s what I was aiming at all this time. What the hell took you so long?

Her trip coincided with Audrey’s second fall. Since it was showtime – really the opening we needed to move her into assisted living -- I arranged a third three-month leave of absence from my job.

(Wouldn’t this make a good sidebar? “My three 3-month leaves in 3 years: a picture of family in crisis. 1. Maternity leave, daughter. 2. Bereavement leave, husband. 3. Arranging move into senior living, mother-in-law.”)

And I packed up her apartment for the old lady’s third move in five years. I Freecycled much of the furniture including the bookshelves Gavin had made for the home they used to share. I thrifted scores of books about Ireland, hardcover mysteries and memoirs, Thomas Merton, and a few strange volumes about what it’s like to live as an ordinary, unimportant person, alone and undistinguished. (I’m not even kidding about those.) I packed up dozens of tchotchkes: kachina dolls, Hummel figures, Nippon statues on fake boxwood bases, and pottery from the years they spent “on the run” in Albuquerque. Each object was a story that I still hoped to someday hear. I photographed how they were arranged so that if she ever wanted to, she could set them up again.

It was so easy for me to slip back into that warm jacket of denial. “In case” she ever comes home, “in case” she remembers and wants that candlestick to be on that same end table.

It’s not that the story ends there, far from it. Things settled down. I was still the only local family, but all the financial and medical responsibility was being sent to the cousin.

My whining was over. I found out that my grief group, like the cousin, was tired of my gripes about eldercare. Getting to know me in my most intense time of life, they thought I was boring.

Now I was just a visitor to Audrey’s room and the parent of her little sunshine. Her dementia continued to progress, which, in a way, made my life easier: I had optimistically planned to visit two or three times a week. Since she couldn’t remember anything, I could pretend to pull that off while I was visiting just once a week, if that much.

In some small way, I knew that her life would run linear and downward from this point, but my fate and hers were disentangled and the relief was overpowering. Just in time, too: she moved in to the first of two assisted living facilities the day of her car accident one year before, the day before the first “sadiversary” of Gavin’s death and I was expecting an avalanche from that.

(to be continued)






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One widow’s mother-in-law story, part 4

(...continued)

When – someday, if I’m ever able – I tell Gavin’s cancer story, it will be suspenseful and satisfying. It will have pacing, contain a gamut of human emotions, and the two leading characters will be transformed before one melts away into the ether. The story is physical and spiritual and illuminated by the small soul of our first, only, treasured child.

But in Audrey’s story, the meaty part is pretty boring. There’s no need for me to walk you through how the cousin’s trip coincided with Audrey’s second fall, and how we moved her at last into a facility with variable choices in assisted living nearby, where Shorty and I could visit often.

What is worth noting, since I have the privilege of being storyteller here, is the conflicts between people trying to “help” the elderly and the official powers that preserve their right and their independence. When I used to do martial arts, one of my mentors told me, “sometimes the best way to protect someone is to break their arm.” At least, an injury removes them from the action and prevents more serious and collateral damage. For twenty years I didn’t know how true this was.

But caring for Audrey – even caring about her and knowing her limits – as she approached 90 and senility was all about determining which pain would be greater and how to see the big picture. And doctors, EMTs, governments got in the way of my protecting her interests as I perceived them. Maybe my self interest was in the way, too, but as I said, I know the outcome and I think history vindicated my judgments.

First, doctors. I was appalled that her primary care doctor couldn’t provide any system to help her keep track of her prescriptions. How hard would it be to write them all down on one sheet of paper so she could check whether they were all filled and how many to take? It’s not protocol, ma’am. I was sick of hearing it during cancer treatment and I was even more frustrated coping with Audrey.

Second, more doctors. When Audrey fell at the corner store buying Nutter Butters to share with my severely peanut-allergic child, she was taken to the hospital where Gavin had been for his last downward spiral. While she was there, her credit card was stolen from her wallet. I was her only contact. I insisted that the doctor keep her in hospital until her care manager and I could arrange her entire move to a more supervised setting. I told him that he’d be responsible for her early death if he sent her back home unsupervised. I told him she wasn’t capable of taking her medications and didn’t eat. He stuck to the symptoms he could observe (she fooled his dementia test, too, as long as they administered it before sundown – they diagnosed her with “sundowning” without actually recognizing it as part of dementia!) and sent her home after 2 days.

Third, the EMTs. One morning when she was extremely confused and unable to handle her phone, I called 911 because I was sure she’d collapsed. When the emergency staff arrived, they refused to take her to the hospital because she said she hadn’t eaten yet and had collapsed from hunger. I told them about her dementia but they listened to her (she was disoriented, but didn’t want to go to the hospital). I told them they were making a big mistake and walked out. The EMTs made her some toast, which she insisted would fix everything.

These two failures were followed within a few days by a second serious fall outside. (I think I mentioned my oracular powers?) This time, a different doctor at a different hospital listened to me and arranged for her to be discharged to a rehab facility for a vague and extended period. During this time, we were able to sabotage everything she wanted and move her into a care situation that she desperately needed. A hostile takeover of her entire life, this represented the hardest love and best care I’ve ever given.

Fourth, the government. I talked to our MVA, state and county officials, and professional senior care managers. There’s virtually no way to take away a senior’s drivers’ license unless they have multiple convictions for reckless driving. You might say “until they kill someone,” but actually, it would take a few fatalities, unless there was evidence they were drinking, for the state to act. I was advised to steal her keys, lie and cheat on my own time, but there was no officialdom that would support me if she protested. Even the insurance company was bound to keep insuring her.

Every day, she put at the top of her to-do list, scrawled on an envelope, “buy new car,” but fortunately she proved herself unable to make it to any dealership, even in a cab (remember she’d totaled her car, and I took my loaner back). She was de facto restrained from driving but when she died, a year and a half later, with advanced dementia, she still had a perfectly good driver’s license.

Fighting a stage IV cancer for two years with my beloved, I was used to living in “you and me against the world” mode, and I’m by nature a bit contrarian, occasionally to the point of being oppositional. So it was easy for me to get pissed at authority figures who were only doing their job. But in caring for someone, “doing a job” doesn’t really do the job.

In my bizarre situation, not really obligated to care for her but doing so anyway, there was no way for things to work well. A family member would have lied and cheated, someone who didn’t have a job and a toddler might have been more aggressive in watching her, but me? I was stuck in limbo between nothing and everything and I couldn’t handle one bit of it, and wouldn’t let go.

Until, thank heaven, the cousin took over.


(to be continued)




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One widow’s mother-in-law story, part 3

(...continued)

Caring for my mother-in-law for two years really was the straw that nearly broke my back. For one thing, my brain wasn’t working very well. You’ve heard of “Mommy brain?” There’s a particular kind of mental disorganization that intrinsically affects those tending to the needs of toddlers, not even counting postpartum hormonal changes, not counting the depletion as you nurse out your last drop to a dependent. The fog – the limitation of one’s mental upside -- is similar to the abilities of someone in the darkest time of grief.

Which means that I was operating at a triple handicap. When Gavin was alive I used to joke that “fighting cancer is hard enough, but just try it with the g*damn Barney song stuck in your head all day!” Now that my daughter was older, it was the music from the Backyardigans, each composition just different enough that they all blended together (Damn you, Evan Lurie! You’re too good! Why couldn’t the Lounge Lizards soldier on for 30 years and let the damn Rolling Stones write UNcatchy songs for cartoons?).

All I needed to turn into a complete dud was to be around someone with dementia, who not only never knew the day of the week, but forgot what calendars are for. Audrey had ceased to understand clocks and the natural changes during the day and between seasons.

Mommy brain + widow brain + Backyardigans music + grandma’s dementia = a brilliant woman who can barely read the Garnet Hill catalog and burns the frozen pizza.

I said the same thing over and over again: perhaps it’s an unhealthy focus for me at this point, with so much else on my plate. But it was my duty not to drop Audrey. My DOODY. And Gavin would want me to take care of her. He’d die – again – if he knew how poorly she was doing.

And again I’m saying the same thing, over and over, because grief is like that. Falling. Broken. Dropped. Words that described everything about us at that time in what we still knew was the bright treasure known as life. I spent every ounce trying to not fall too deep, knowing I was broken, but eating and sleeping and waking and doing laundry every day.

See? It almost sounds like a good situation for someone with dementia: a continual present with a Mommy nearby. Not hers, but still.

The most distressing part, for me, of being anywhere near Audrey was her lack of connection with her body. She called several times a day complaining of stomach pain, and headaches, and a “sicky” feeling. She sounded like some kind of oracle, always foreboding, avoiding responsibility because she forgot there was aspirin in the world and neglected to eat and drink. I’d bring her toast and tea but roll my eyes in the kitchen. I wanted to hit her.

Yes, I blamed Gavin for falling (that word again) down on his responsibility to her. On the other hand, what could he have done? With her son dying and cognitive impairment, would she have said, "you're right! I DO have to give up driving and move into a home!"?

One of my turning points was reading a discussion online about Alzheimer’s caregivers that stated, “Lack of insight into one’s own health is a hallmark of dementia.” Lack of insight into one’s own health is a hallmark of dementia – I loved it! I pinned the phrase up on my board at work, alongside the embarrassing typos of other editors, and laughed every day. And I was able to start really accepting that her problems were biological in nature, nothing to do with me or us and nothing that I could help.

(to be continued)


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One widow’s mother-in-law story, part 2

(... continued)

All, every, only: this is the extreme language of my mother-in-law story. It was a period of absolutes everywhere and most of the time, we were alone. Why does everyone abandon grieving people? Why are you afraid? Don’t answer that, I know why, it just hurts like hell to be abandoned by people who you know are perfectly healthy, across town, and have a choice. That's alone.

Compared to my mother-in-law, at least I had a job to get out to. On the other hand, I knew what was going on. There were days that Audrey was obviously disoriented, even before I intervened in her care, straightened out her medications and hired a care manager for her on the sly, on my own dime. Before the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and the first of two long-term living arrangements, two hospital stays and a rehab facility.

I knew her thyroid was off. There was a day in April, two months before the end, when she was acting really crazy, talking to a stuffed animal about some red dress of mine. Short Stack knew something was up and wouldn’t play with her alone. I asked Gavin to speak to her and ended up accompanying her to her doctor. She wasn’t taking her thyroid medication correctly. We tried to straighten it out.

I don’t know if Gavin ever spoke to her about needing more help or brought up any topics that threatened her independence. She’d been so realistic about it in the past few years, but plans had dissolved as he became ill. She did have an episode, shortly after moving near us, of near-kidney failure due to some error with her prescriptions. After the thyroid incident, of course, that fit together: she was doubling up on some and omitting others randomly, accidentally playing pillbox Russian roulette.

And the visible signs of her decline started to accelerate as his condition worsened. She crashed her car the day before he died; we tried to pretend none of us noticed the cut on her nose but he was too out of it to ask about it anyway. The day after he died I went to her apartment briefly to help her open a stubborn bedroom window and ended up checking her fridge. A pot of special diet cabbage soup on the bottom shelf was full of gray-yellow mass, brimming over with spores. At least we found out that her garbage disposal, newfangled and misunderstood as it was, did work.

Without Gavin around, her cover-ups were removed: she had very little mental capacity left. She didn’t seem to understand how to take her dozen or so medications and insisted to me that if she was someone who needed medicine, she wouldn’t be out walking around.

You can say that I pounced on her in my grief, but she had been losing weight over the past two years. I’d left her largely alone until the thyroid incident because I was overwhelmed, but I knew her history better than she did.

But of course she was hostile to my suggestions that she fill and take her prescriptions.

So Gavin was dead, I was a wreck, and she had no car. To my credit (with her) and my detriment (in terms of good judgment and responsibility to the world) I loaned her my Corolla, the same make and model as hers. It was clear to me she couldn’t have handled any vehicle with differently laid-out controls. It was not clear to me that she should have just been off the road altogether.

Finally some friends talked me into taking my car back from her. She was, after all, most likely to run over my child in my driveway. I had a friend who’d lost a child the same age this way.

Audrey continued to walk over to our house every night for dinner in our grey silence, to enjoy the blessed child, but she was getting weaker and weaker. She’d complain her stomach hurt and then not remember if she’d eaten anything. A block was a long way for her to walk, and her bones were showing through her skin where she’d been round and saggy just a few years before. Conspiring with her doctor, I hired a private care nurse to check in on her once in a while, under the guise of weighing her. She’d refill the prescriptions and check the pillboxes each visit and provide her good ears.

I don’t know why I didn’t understand how dire her situation was during this period. There was nearly a year when the nurse would stop by and update me, but the word “Alzheimer’s” was never mentioned. And every cognitive test, Audrey could fool: she’d do fine and even joke with medical providers, familiar or new. Maybe the nurse was protecting me, maybe she thought the decline would be slower, maybe I just couldn’t hear, again. Maybe I was burned out on caregiving and medical situations overall.

It was clear to me that caregiving an elder, even with no acute medical threats, was different from caring for a young cancer patient (even a “December” spouse) who might, even with a miracle, be cured: Gavin wanted so badly to live. Audrey didn’t even understand that she was old.

Once as I tried to convince her (O rationality! How futile thou art!) that she would benefit from a little help she told me that she was perfectly healthy. She had no idea what all those medicines in her pillboxes were for but she was sure she didn’t need them. In astonishment I tried to echo to her: “So, are you asserting that generally, as someone gets older, they tend to get stronger and healthier?” “Yes!” she asserted with a confident nod.

It was a different world and I just wanted OUT of it, but I felt, absent my husband, that I was responsible for her. I didn’t know how I could do it, but I did know that if I failed, I’d feel a hit I couldn’t manage along with everything else.


(to be continued)


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One widow's mother-in-law story, part 1

Before










After





Our stories are intertwined, hers and mine, in life, in love and in grief. We even share an old-lady name: her first name, Audrey, is my middle name. An only child, an Irish son, Gavin lived with her into his forties, and then I stole him, made his home mine, ate his cooking, bore his child. He was all she ever had, more than she wanted or expected, I think, until Short Stack came along, and you know what they say about grandkids.

She is a big part of my story of loss, my mother-in-law, because when Gavin died, we were all she had left. She had no family, he had no siblings, the only cousins a good ten-hour drive away and preoccupied with their own rapid changes.

When he died, this old woman and I were pointed straight at each other: two of the three most important people in his life, three females, two of us fighting in some sense over the third, the little one, the joy in our dark days.

Someone wise pointed this out to me early on in that first year and I didn’t believe it: Audrey wished it had been me who died, and I wished it had been her. To both of us, that would have been natural and just. She was, in secret, dreaming of stealing away with my little girl and making a new life together. That is crazy, I thought. No way. She loves me and I love her! She’s always been so good to me! And surely, she doesn’t think she can take care of a kid in diapers.

As the year wore on, I saw that this interpretation of our lives was not only true but inevitable. We each had the arrow of our entire life pointed at Gavin. When he fell from the picture those missiles hung tense in the air, wobbled for a moment, then found their straight aim. Of course, he had eyes only for our little girl, and responsibility for Audrey, aging rapidly. Despite my sacrifices, my sharing of everything I was and all I loved, I had to be a distant third to him as his light faded. Some stories, some favorites, write themselves.

But Audrey was not simple, though she wished to be, and Gavin, loyal and honest, was not the diligent one in our household.

My mother-in law-had dementia and when Gavin died, I was the only one she could turn to, had she wanted to turn. I was the knob on which her independence fell and bumped its head. I helped her more than she wanted, less than she needed, and I said it more than once -- heck, I probably said it more than once a week -- during the two years she outlived him: my mother-in-law was killing me.

Caregiving Gavin shattered my soul, into a thousand pieces it went down, and then caregiving his mother stomped the bits and left them in mush. Nonetheless I fulfilled the obligations I felt so heavy on me, full of rage at his refusal to deal with her, at their mutual stubborn independence and their calm ignorance, parenting another, one with no hope of progress or cure. There were two people in diapers in my life: one age 3 and on the way up, and one age 90 on the way down, and I’d already lost the one closest to my age, the one I leaned on. I felt acutely the irony of being the most competent in a household of a toddler and a senile elder, as I was grieving and trying to hold down a job and heaven forbid, find the light ahead. But hell, I was the one who could drive.

Alone, desperate, broke, shakily in charge, I would have been happy to kill my husband then, if it would have saved my daughter and I, but, as is the case in every story of dementia, it was too fucking late.


(continued...)


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