Rainy Day

There are good days and bad days.
I am having a hard day today while I'm off work from my part-time retail job.


Every time I see daytime television show that my mother enjoyed, like the Talk or The Chew, etc. I start to think too much about my mother and the tears come again. The women of my tribe shop for entertainment and anything food and cooking was of great interest to my mother. Fortunately, I am not an avid shopper or QVC fan, but its that classic WASPy suburban culture that I now associate with my mother, especially from my month spent with her in October. She shopped to excess for entertainment. She obsessed over her weight all of her life. She obsessed over and enjoyed fashion trends, jewelry of all kinds, and the latest cosmetics and skincare products. Most of my nice clothes and makeup were given to me by her. This also reinforces my lack of female friends here, in NC, where I live now. I am cut off from anything feminine now without my friends around me. I really need the Womens Night ladies and the Crafty Kitch chicks and the Goth Glamour girls.

My mother was also my main connection to my family and what everyone was up to. No one else ever spoke to me or called. It was my conversations with her that kept me informed. Without her bridging that gap, I fear I will have no family. Maybe that's an irrational fear. I can only hope that all the positive bonding that took place during her passing will stay intact. I do not think my family have any understanding of my situation. It is especially sad that MonsterMustDie has no appreciation of relationships in this way after growing up as an only child in an always-relocating military family.

Maybe it's the last washing away of all of the stress from the last 5 months. Really, the last year has been nothing but stress of one sort or another. I am officially giving up on building any sort of life for myself here in North Carolina. I want to be with my people. I hate it here. It is the people and relationships that I spent a lifetime creating that I need. Some things that are started in one's twenties and thirties can not easily be recreated now because life is different and it seems like most people my age are not looking for new experiences. I don't see much art here. Art is a spiritual part of me - it is a way of living and thinking that is now gone from my life. I still want to do stupid, creative, theatrical, immature, silly things with friends and any joiners I can find. And, at last, I have not been to any live music shows or taken part in any events here. The old rocker in me is sad. I still long for the crunchy music but I have no new haunts or scenes to be a part of.

I still lack a full-time job after a year so I don't even have the ego boost of work and full professional involvement to float on. I am lucky that MonsterMustDie is able to support me, even though he often lets me know that he wants my to find work or create work for myself that would allow me to pay my half of the living expenses here. Believe me, I would gladly do that - I desperately want to be financially enabled. Being essentially a house wife leaves me with no power whatsoever on any household decisions here. I am now offically a sub. I tell everyone this is his house and I am just lucky enough to be allowed to live here.

My mood will lighten up eventually but today everything really sucks.

Sick

Sick. So very sick.

Didn't get out of bed all day Wednesday. Had a slight fever of 100.5. Could this be the flu? I've never had the flu so I don't know. Even when I did think I had the flu once, the lab said it was only a really bad cold but this feels much worse.

Thursday, somewhat better. No fever but my head felt like it is about to explode from sinus pressure and it hurt like being stabbed in the chest every time I coughed. I tried to go in to the closest medical clinic and was turned away because they weren't taking new patients when I came in.

Friday night, MonsterMustDie took me to the Urgent Care doc-in-a-box I'd been to before. I ended up being seen by the same doctor who tried to give me vallium to go with the prednisone that I got for my severe poison ivy last summer. This time, he tried to give me Prednisone again for the sinus headache but ended up prescribing a cough syrup and Z-pack.

This morning, I woke up with a disabling headache, ringing ears, and stiff neck that had me incapacitated until noon. I got out of bed finally at 1PM when the headache finally faded. I am blaming the Z-pack. MonsterMustDie thinks I should continue the antibiotics no matter what but there is no fucking way I can put myself through what I felt this morning again. I've had similar reactions to other antibiotics in the past but this was the worst I've felt in many years.

Even now, I have the head and body aches with ringing ears and light sensitivity but it is at last at a tolerable level.

Anniversaries

Today is the 11th aniversary of the death of my father, James Ray Perry. It is interesting that Mom died so close to the aniversary of his death.

My Mother Is Gone

At 4:00 pm on February 1, 2016, my mother breathed her last breath and her heart stopped shortly thereafter. She was in a hospital bed surrounded by family. It was a very hard end for her and everyone around her. It was her choice to go when she did the way she did it, by discontinuing her dialysis treatments. I still don't agree with her choice but it was her choice to make, not mine. She had been very unhappy for a long time.

Once again, everything in my life has stopped and must be rebooted all over again. But that's life, isn't it?

 Helen Loretta Crowe Perry during our last time together in October 2015

Here's some food for thought from other people:

from my good friend Jae Paul Harrison

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with some friends. The conversation flowed through many subjects — some hilarious, many frivolous, but also some substantive and, though discussed with a certain dark wit, markedly sad. All of us at the table had lost a parent, a couple of us just within the past year or so, and I mused at one point that I know (actually KNOW, not just am acquainted with) a full dozen people who had a parent die in 2015.

I know this is the circle of life (or whatever sugarcoated Disney metaphor one prefers), but I can say now with an authority conferred by personal experience, anectodal evidence, and overwhelming proof than no one is every really ready to be orphaned, even if only partially.

Today, a dear friend's mother passed away, making my friend the 16th person I know to lose a parent since I lost my dad last January. Yes, since that dinner just a few weeks ago, 4 more of my friends have been left to make arrangements and find inner reserves of grace they didn't know they had to weather the kind support and helplessness their friends display at these awful moments of grief. We all stand by, hoping that there is something that we can offer, knowing that there really isn't. Comfort comes only with time, and it takes a lot more of that than you might expect if you haven't been through it.

A friend of mine who lost his father shockingly and unexpectedly when my friend was not yet 30 years old told me that he always checks back with the bereaved after 6 months or so because "by then, everyone else has forgotten and moved on, but that's when it really hits you that you never get to have a conversation with your dad ever again, and that's when you feel most alone." In a book by Christopher Buckley, I read, "You don't remember who shows up, but you definitely remember who doesn't."

I don't know where I'm going with this except that my friend lost her mother today. I want better words than "I'm sorry for your loss." I want something more tangible to offer than yet another question for my friend to answer when I ask, as everyone she knows will ask, "Is there anything I can do for you?" I want somehow to ease what cannot be eased and to shine light I do not have into a darkness that I haven't found my way out of even yet.

But all I have is this concern, this compassion, this empathy, and this wish that we didn't have this thing in common.

For all of you who have walked this year with me, carrying your own sorrow for your own losses, you were in my prayers at your freshest loss, and you are still in my prayers.

Always Go To The Funeral
by DEIRDRE SULLIVAN
August 08, 2005
I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.
The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. "Dee," he said, “you’re going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family.”
So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there. When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson's shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, "Sorry about all this," and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss Emerson's mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.
That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, "You can't come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral."
Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.
"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.
On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Mother

This photo was taken last October while she was still recovering from a fall.

 

She was still wearing the arm sling although her doctor told her that she did not need it anymore. It made her arm feel better and made her feel, somehow, more secure. 

It is finished.

My mother died today at 4:00 p.m. After days of struggling, rallying again, then dropping her blood pressure, then recovering, her heart finally stopped. 

Dark Night

Just wandering around my mother's home, unable to sleep.  Going through her closet while trying to make room to hang the clothes I brought.  There are so many clothes hanging,  never worn, with the price tags still on them. There are never - read books and a new DVD of Downtown Abby,  still shrink wrapped.  My mother, by her own choice,  is dying in a hospital room now and there is so much she was still planning to do.  The decision she made seems too quick but I know it was her decision to make.

The infamous food processor she purchased while I was with her, telling me "You can inherit it" when I raised an eyebrow at it, is still in the box.  She bought it because it chops/cubes - a feature that her old one doesn't have.

I found some red wine I had squirrel ed away and poured myself a glass.  Now I'm just sitting in the floor writing, drinking & crying.  Can't sleep.  Noticing how all the lights are on timers.

Bygone

Mother's bookshelf

Traveling home

My mother had decided to continue her dialysis when she was in so much pain after trying to discontinue going to treatments from home. This gave me hope that she was adjusting to life with her caregiver and still depending on a walker or, most recently, a wheelchair to get around.  

Then she changed her mind and wanted to discontinue all medical treatment. She does not want to live if she can't do so at home, with her dogs, on her own. She says she is tired. She said we have to let her go. She wants to die rather than have to live in managed care. She went back into the hospital and was on morphine. She was not speaking to me or answering my phone calls for several days. Now I know why she was avoiding me.

 

I am always trying to catch Bill Board when I am traveling between North Carolina and Georgia. 

Her final decision

We were already planning to drive down to Georgia early Saturday morning to visit my mother. I got a call from my sister-in-law last night to say that my mother had decided to discontinue her treatments again and wanted pain medication above all else. This meant the medication alone might kill her. My sister-in-law said Mom might not make it through the night on the meds and will probably be only semi-conscious from this point on. She phrased it as I should probably be there last night but, since everyone thinks that travel on icy roads at night might be dangerous,  I should come down today rather than Saturday.

I emailed work to explain that I would not be in today and why, briefly. Got an affirmative response from my manager, who said he completely understood.

I am packing as much as I might need to wear. MonsterMustDie started complaining about me bringing too many things and not wanting to bring clothes for a funeral. I told him the future is uncertain and that, if he didn't want my stuff filling up his car on the drive down to my mother's house, I would just make the trip alone. Looks like he's relented and will be coming down with me and my clothes today. I can leave everything I bring at my mother's house, spread out on her bed if we leave on Sunday morning. At least, if I don't need it immediately for an unplanned long stay there, I'll be more prepared. This is no longer a plan to make a fast visit in one day, like he wanted to do originally.

This morning

I got this text from my sister-in-law this morning. 

Loretta has decided she doesn't want dialysis.

I'll go in the morning to Anderson Mill just to make sure. 

She is very tired and just wants to die. 

She is pretty swollen right now. The nurse talked to all of us and explained to Loretta that the fluid will make her heart stop. Loretta said the doctor said her spine is gone. I'll talk to the doctor in the morning about moving her to a hospice facility...

By tonight, my mother has decided she is in too much pain not to get dialysis. Missing her treatments has caused much more serious swelling and her potassium levels are high as well as her blood pressure.

New text from my sister-in-law. 

Fwd: Hi Jules. She is doing much better. Kids and Andy are here. 

They will do dialysis in the morning since her blood pressure is high. 

MonsterMustDie wants to come with me to Georgia. This, of course means taking time off the new job I am training for. I'll talk to my supervisor tomorrow to tell him I've got to take Saturday through Monday off so we can make the trip. We have keys to my mother's place so I plan to just stay there in Kennesaw while we are down to see her. Don't know what else to do. I mean I really don't know what to do or when to do it. My mother is not answering or returning my phone calls. All I can think of doing is just showing up at the hospice to see her.

Mother

My sister-in-law phoned yesterday afternoon to let me know my mother was refusing to go to dialysis treatment.  She was complaining about not being able to sit up long enough for the 4-hours it takes because she is in too much pain from bed sores caused by rehab workers refusing to clean her properly. She has been in the new rehab center less than a week now. 

She spent just a couple of days at home after being released from  the hospital with my brother and uncle trying to  help her. The first night home was enough to convince everyone that she can't live there anymore. She really needs to be in assisted living and the last thing she wants to do is go to "a home." 

Last night was a meeting with her doctors and my brother and uncle. 

signal is silent

She is finally out of the hospital, only to spend a day at home before going to another rehab center. My brother and uncle were at her house the evening she came home and the two of them together were unable to care for her. My brother had to get back to work and can't be there for her.

My sister-in-law has taken the two dogs to a West Highland Terrier rescue group. My uncle is still not 100% back to normal health and now has unexplained fainting spells. I tried phoning my mother today but was only able to leave voicemails. My sister-in-law has told me the cell phone reception is very bad there and she does not have a landline phone in her room. I'll keep trying but I don't expect to get through.

It's almost a relief not to talk to her, to be honest, rather than hear her sobbing for the entire call. She just talks about how bad her doctors and nurses are and how nobody cares about her, including myself. I can't shake off the sorrow I feel every time I try to talk to her. My sister-in-law says a glass or two of merlot immediately afterwards helps.