Tag Archives: family

The Dirt that Siblings Throw

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , ,

I started talking to a grief counselor, and she wants me to journal about my grief.  I can do that.  Hell, the only time I ever journal is when I am trying to make some sense of my grief.  I didn’t tell her I already blog about it, but that’s irrelevant. 

I’m not good with counselors.  I can smell a scripted approach.  I picked this one because I plugged all my needs into a website that could find me a counselor based on my insurance and my problems.  Her’s was the second profile that came up.  In her picture, she was standing outside in rain gear in horrible weather, smiling like she had just climbed Mount Everest.  She told me later that she was standing in a hurricane in that pic.  That picture and her credentials were enough to sign me up—extensive post-graduate work in grief and trauma.  I think she’s going to unearth a lot more than grief.

So this entry begins my “grief journal.”  One of my brothers, the one I don’t like, didn’t give me a Christmas present this year.  I think it’s because he knew there wouldn’t be any blow-back from Dad.  It’s a sinister assumption to make, but my brother is sinister.  I can picture him ranting to his wife about how he’ll keep me in the loop until Dad’s gone, then he’ll make a neat, clean break.  His DNA is 50% ADHD and 50% anger.  Life has no meaning for him if he has nothing to rage against.

I told my new counselor a little bit about him—that he’s a narcissist, that he ruined his children, then turned his back on them, then turned his back on me.  But I won’t let him ruin me.  Why is all this coming up in a grief journal?  Well, we have no more parental glue.  My kind brother wants to foster more communication.  My narcissist brother wants to be free of any obligations to a sister who clearly thinks she is better than he is.  His words.  As I write this, I wonder which one of us needs the counseling more. 

Everyone—family, colleagues, friends—loved and appreciated my obituary for Dad.  I made him human, my husband told me.  My eulogy will do the same.  I will send him off as the dad that I remember, not the one my brothers do.  But I’m not stupid.  I know that they had a very different experience being raised by young parents.  My mother was nineteen when the first of my brothers was born.  And she told me stories about trying to parent in the ‘60s, and it wasn’t pretty, and my dad was far from saintly.  Dad tried to tell me the same from his angle after she died.  He had a lot of guilt.  I told him that everyone has their regrets, everyone has made their mistakes.  The secret to happiness is you don’t dwell. 

Poor Dad was convinced he was going to hell.  I think that’s why he clung to life for so long.  The truth is, like my obituary expressed, that he was a deeply caring and complex person, a man many many people loved.  You don’t earn that status by being a bastard or alienating your children.

The Aftermath–Little Triggers

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

I’m sitting at my dining room table in the dark with my laptop and half of a bottle of Maker’s Mark.  C and I bought it to celebrate New Year’s Eve with our own party of two on the balcony of our hotel overlooking the Savannah River.  We drank half of the bottle then, in our pajamas, smoking cigarettes and remarking how relieved we were that it had occurred to us that our room came with a balcony and we didn’t need to squeeze ourselves into the New-Year’s crowds waiting for hours on the Savannah riverfront or up on a rooftop bar that charged a fortune for the privilege of being there.  24 hours we’d been at that place, wondering where we could position ourselves to glimpse the fireworks without having to actually socialize with other people. 

That’s the kind of people we are.  Smart.  But not so smart.  So we parked ourselves on the narrow balcony with some prosecco and some Maker’s Mark and watched lame fireworks on this New Year’s Eve.  Our neighbor who blows up the neighborhood every fourth-of-July puts on a better show, sadly, than the city of Savannah did this year. This is a city that prides itself on two holidays–St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve–but it “dropped the ball” on this occasion. 

Hey, I’m not complaining.  We didn’t plan to go to Savannah to celebrate New Year’s Eve.  We had planned to go there just because we’d never been and—months ago—it seemed like a good time to go, considering that we’d probably spend Christmas with Dad and new a few buffer days in-between before hitting the road again, and just before C and I had to go back to work.  Those were the plans just a few months ago.  Once again, our world changed brutally and abruptly.

So we went to Savannah after my dad died.  It was a lovely distraction, but I knew it for that–I always knew, at every juncture that I should probably be grieving.  We drank all day on December 30th, starting with a welcome glass of champagne at check-in for being special traveling members of the hotel chain, ending in the hotel bar, ordering purple cocktails that I cannot name at last-call.  I could barely walk during our ghost tour earlier that evening, over cobblestones and down into cramped basements.  I don’t remember what the tour guide told us, but I remember feeling like we were characters in a big charade, nineteenth-century folks ooooing and ahhhhhing over the freaks in the circus tent. But without the freaks or anything so interesting.  After the ghost tour, we made our late dinner reservation at a place that I should have been truly present to experience.  I can’t really remember the food—just some fuzzy images and C’s reminders the next day of how fucking brilliant those wings were, the wings that earned the restaurant a Michelin star. Each day in Savannah began later, with clouded heads and clouded emotions and more adventures with unsustainable habits.

Savannah is a beautiful city, though.  I think it’s the most beautiful city I have ever seen.  Still, every once in a while, something would trigger me, and I’d start crying, seemingly at random.  Wild new thoughts would hit me at inopportune times.  The biggest bash in the head was the realization that I don’t have a place to go home to anymore.  I have my brother, but we’re not so close despite these months of bringing us somewhat closer.  I can’t just announce that I’m going to come up and stay with him.  It puts me in position I have never been in before—I can’t go home without an invitation.  My brother and I, we still have some communicating to do, or—rather—to practice.  He asked me on Friday, two days after Dad died, when I was planning on coming back.  The only answer that came to me was maybe in a couple of weeks, because I thought I might be able to deal with it in a couple of weeks. 

In truth, I am putting off going back up there because I can’t face going into Dad’s apartment.  It’s too soon, and I just can’t turn around and go back like that.  I’ll have a breakdown on the threshold of the place.  It dawned on me though, that my brother might think I don’t want to come up and claim what I want of Dad’s things.  He’s so efficient, already taking trips to the Goodwill and divvying up the stuff.  Wants me to tell him what I want.  I don’t know what I want.  Maybe I want that marble ashtray that he used for his cigars, or maybe I want his cane with the handle that unfolds into a little seat, so he could take a load off when the walking got too much.  Maybe I should just go up there and do what I need to do.  But just thinking about the five hours in the car each way… damn, I’ll cry myself off the road. 

I can’t be with people, but I can’t be alone, if that makes any sense.  So I wrote an email to my brother because I can express myself better in writing than in any other way.  I told him how I felt, and I told him to call me, and he did. It’s hard to START a communicating with a sibling with whom you have never really had a close relationship.  Miscommunication can happen in crisis, even among people who are close.  I thought I was walking on eggshells, but he told me it’s all good. He said my uncle, my dad’s littlest brother, probably couldn’t come up for the same reason. He got me.

We let politics get in the way for a long time. My big brother is so much kinder than I gave him credit for, so much more intuitive, so much smarter, so very ethical and thoughtful. I understand now why his wife acts like she does–defensive, territorial, protective–around me. I have been the snarky lefty, and my brothers have been the imaginary enemy for a long time now. I’ve been the fly in the ointment and the abrasive other side of shit. It’s been a battle, when it should have been a bonding. We shouldn’t HAVE TO BOND while someone we love is dying, but in these waters, death and tragedy are the only way we’re going to connect and maybe even get us to another level. 

My big brother likes to be organized–he got that shit from our mother–he likes everything in its place and things to be where they need to be. He sends me pictures of Dad’s stuff, and I pick out the piece or pieces that I can’t live without from among the piles, and he sets them aside for me. I don’t know where his mind is, but I know he’s hurting. He’s the oldest son, the man in charge, and perchance he didn’t ask for that title, but that’s what he got. He was the first. When he was born, my mom was nineteen, and my dad twenty-one, and I’m not even sure my dad was present for the birth of his first child. He and my other brother who I can’t bring myself to talk about got the young–the very young–parents. I got the ones in their thirties. 

But I believe I started this reverie with a bottle of Maker’s Mark, or half.  It’s still there.  I got it out my bag when I decided sleep wasn’t coming and brought it to the dining room table as an option.  But I don’t want it.  I really don’t want it.  I’m staring at it now with more curiosity than actual desire to consume.  I’m so tired of booze.  

Bring on the morphine.

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m home now, and I have the privilege of spending this day doing whatever random shit I feel like doing.  I ate some pasta for breakfast. I started to dismantle my garden.  Winter is finally here.  I told my Early Girl that I was proud of it because it still had a little life left in there, in the stem and the roots.  That one was the only tomato that I intentionally planted that survived the season.  I concluded the season cultivating whatever random tomato varieties presented themselves from the compost in the soil.  Nature gifted us with hundreds of sweet little pear tomatoes, sprung from the seeds of some supermarket tomato that didn’t make it onto our plates but did make it into the compost.  I talked to my nearly-dead tomatoes and my dead eggplants and peppers and I cried a little in between.  I think I’m going to need to seek some therapy.  I’ve avoided it for a long time, but this grief has compounded over these past two weeks, and I’m numb.  And I’m acting weird.  Something in there is broken.

We left town yesterday, my hubby and I.  Left my brother to witness the very end.  It was selfish of me to leave, but I wanted to leave so badly that all I could think about to keep me from breaking down all day was how great it was gonna feel to be in my cluttered, dirty house with my dogs and my own stuff.  My own messes in my own home.  Yesterday was a turning point at the “skilled nursing facility.”  The 23 year-old floor manager who’s probably at her first job out of college because she can’t deviate from a script popped into Dad’s cubicle to tell me they wanted to schedule all this shit—put him back on an IV, take him to the hospital to have some “suspicious node” in his lung checked out, bloodwork, etc.  My husband asked her what the end goal of the hospital visit was, and she responded in all seriousness, “to check to make sure the node isn’t cancerous,” like looking for lung cancer is a priority at this stage in his decline.  I reminded her that Dad had a DNR order, and that it stated that he didn’t want IV fluids.  I also told her Dad didn’t need to go to the hospital to look for lung cancer.  I then called my brother because it’s hard to tell a 23 year-old that she cannot give your dehydrated father IV fluids to sustain his now miserable existence. 

My brother was, of course, pissed that these procedures were even suggested because he had discussed the DNR orders days ago with someone else. 

“Tell her we have a POA on file and a DNR with explicit instructions.  And we can scratch the hospital visits.  We can deal with a suspicious node if he ever snaps out of this.  In the meantime, not a priority.”  

So the befuddled floor manager came back with the beautiful nurse practitioner who I am pretty certain my brother has a giant crush on, and she started asking ME the heavy questions—do I authorize no hospital visits, no trips to the ER, no fluids, no tubes, no CPR?  What the actual fuck is this place?  I didn’t have power-of-attorney.  Legally, I was just a visitor.  I could have authorized any invasive and unnecessary procedure that they threw at me by virtue of being a person in the room.   I’ll bet that my Dad’s friend Jimmy who was in town visiting from Iowa could have authorized it if he happened to be there when the floor manager came by.  

Luckily, my sister-in-law walked in the door at that moment and explained Dad’s predicament very clearly—IVs are only a short-term fix; he doesn’t WANT to get better.  He stopped eating weeks ago when he was much more cognizant of his surroundings.  Basically, he WANTS to die, and we’re going to grant him his wish.  No emergency trips to the ER, no scheduled hospital visits or MRIs, no IV, no resuscitation.  This was HIS decision.

The DNR was Dad’s decision that he put in writing in 1997, long before he had experienced the nursing home circle of hell with my grandmother.  After that, he set up his power of attorney.  He even had a pseudo pact with my uncle that one would kill the other before either one of them ended up in a nursing home.  His biggest nightmare is happening RIGHT NOW, and he just wants out.  Bring on the morphine.  Helping him die comfortably on heavy drugs to numb the pain is the only positive thing that this shithole of a care facility can do for him.  These people can’t even find his pants in his closet.  They put him out in the hall, pantsless, with pneumonia.  This den of incompetence is NEVER going to rehabilitate him, so instead of hurling him into the insurance wood-chipper—transporting him around to useless doctors’ appointments and putting him on an IV every other day just to keep him alive until Medicare can drain all of his assets—it’s going to give him his dying wish.  Enforcing his DNR is all the power we have, and it’s going to this end this nightmare for all of us.

On my way out the door yesterday, while Dad was once again talking the air and trying to get his legs over the side of the bed in a weak attempt to escape, I said, “I love you,” and he replied, “Love you.”  Those are some fine last words, I think.  I, of course, have a lot of regrets about how I handled this ordeal.  I’ll discuss them another time.  I’m fine concluding today’s thoughts with the best last words you can hear from someone—I love you.

The Industry of Dying

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s my second-to-last night in town.  I’ve been dreaming of getting out of Dodge.  Tomorrow, my husband returns.  We straighten out the Christmas gift situation (I had left most of the stuff I bought for people back at our house) and get it all wrapped to leave behind for the nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters-in-law who will be in town or coming through town before I’m back again.  I don’t know why the middle brother is planning to show up the last week in December.  He’s delusional if he thinks Dad will be alive by then.  Personally, I think he’s just comfortable letting our oldest brother handle the situation.  If Dad dies before December 27th or whenever he plans to show up, middle brother can be sad and nostalgic about it, but he won’t have to have witnessed the very last, ugly days.  He will have been spared the pain of watching his father slowly die, and in a most undignified manner, surrounded by burned-out strangers who won’t even bother to clean him or provide him with the most basic of services—cleaning the infected area around his catheter, wiping the gunk out of his red, swollen eyes, brushing the old food out of his mustache, checking his diaper.  If that brother-who-gets-off-easy thinks trips to Dad’s private room in the hospital three weeks ago were taxing, he’ll be able to sleep well having missed out on this travesty.

And I think I kinda hate him for that, even though I probably won’t be around to see Dad’s very last, ugly days myself—when you don’t live in town, you can’t always stay in town.  But I wanted to be with him when he took his last breath, like I had been with Mom.  Mom got to die at home with me and Dad and a few hospice nurses to help her along.  Her death took five days and nights of stress and grief and hell, but it was intimate.  Dad’s death will not be.  Two weeks ago, before Dad was shipped off to this penitentiary that we can’t bust him out to put him in the living room if we wanted to, I watched him sleeping, and I was reminded of Mom, and I thought, “You can go now. Why don’t you go now?”  Come to find out, death is not that easy. And come to find out, I am not that tough. I’ve spent two weeks here, sleeping in his apartment, looking at his things, and visiting him every day in a place that puts my stomach in knots to even think about going into. Yes, my husband is coming for me tomorrow, and I selfishly want to get out of Dodge. But what does that mean? Does that mean that tomorrow, or the next morning, when I look at Dad is his bed, and listen to him speak, no matter what he is saying, that will be the last time I see him and hear him alive? That gives me pause. I think there are going to be some very very difficult months ahead for my mental health. These aren’t easy decisions.

Middle brother didn’t get away entirely free.  Apparently, Dad laid into him, and only him, about the betrayal that he felt when he realized he was stuck there in that hospital.  Dad yelled at him, “You betrayed me.”  He literally said that.  Middle brother must have made him some big promises, bigger than our conservative older brother would be willing to make in good conscience.   Cuz he ain’t telling us we betrayed him, and we’re witnesses to the biggest indignities of his life.  Both brothers made Dad promises that I was unaware of—Dad was worried I wouldn’t have the guts to pull the plug.  I would have been the first if I’d been given that option over seeing his rapid decline in the past two weeks.  But Dad is now in “the system.”  Big brother has power of attorney and DNR that we all discussed last night, Middle B on speaker.  It says that he wants no IV hydration or tube-feeding should be in a place of no-return.  The big question was, IS he in place of no return?  His neurologist says that with proper nutrition, hydration, he could possibly get his mind back in a couple of months… and THEN what?  He’ll be cognizant of the nursing home that’s bleeding him dry?  No.  We three, unanimously, decided that if Dad doesn’t want to eat, and Dad doesn’t want artificial hydration, then we should honor that.  It’s the only power we have left.  We can’t make his care get better.  We tried that.  But we can make it end faster. 

In a better health-care situation—where problems, when identified, are addressed immediately, and where patients are surrounded by well-paid advocates who can make decisions for them that aren’t influenced by middle-men or bureaucratic roadblocks—in that situation we’d keep going.  In THIS situation, it’s better to die as soon as possible.

Coping Mechanisms for the Middle-Aged.

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , ,

My husband and I are staying at my Dad’s place during this marathon of unpleasant experiences.  It’s not the most romantical of settings.  I had insisted to my husband to just stay home and that I was just fine being here at Dad’s by myself, but he ignored me and came anyway.  Good thing.  I can allow this man’s eccentricities to entertain me, and I can feel at home in his presence.  On his way back to Dad’s place a few days ago, he went into record-hunting mode—that’s his latest obsession since his dad bought him a turntable for Father’s Day—and found a store that sells vinyl in some small town en route to my childhood home and distracted himself there for awhile, reliving his own particular childhood.  Today, he found another record store, and we both went, and I got some used Donna Summers and some Pink Floyd.  I think he got an Ozzy record.  He chastised himself several hours later, when I told him to grab Loretta Lynn if he ever sees her records, because he had been looking at a copy of Coal Miner’s Daughter and didn’t buy it.  He was getting real hard on himself, and that made me laugh—the absurdity of it all.  The very least of either of our worries is why my husband didn’t grab the Loretta Lynn record before I had even told him I wanted one.  He has a handful of oddities and work-arounds.  Those are the some of his most fascinating features.  And he’s HERE, supporting me through another parent crisis.  No one voluntary spends time in a nursing home unless it’s absolutely necessary, and I believe he thinks it is, which means that he thinks family is worthy of any sacrifice.  And if he believes that, then he is really on to something.  Why deprive ourselves, then, of some small pleasures along Misery Road, like buying an Ozzy record?  Seems a decent way to stay sane, right? 

I, myself, took advantage of a discount warehouse and refreshed my active workout gear.  Bargains are intoxicating.  A Donna Summers record for $3 and a North Face sweatshirt  for ten?  I’d call that a good day in the realm of disbelief and avoidance.  I forget what my husband asked me, but it had something to do with my holding up or self-care or something.  Without a second thought, I declared that I was simply on auto-pilot.  I realize that I am not allowing all of my emotions to reveal themselves right now.  I can shut some down when I need to, and I don’t want anyone who can’t do that invading my space or coming to visit Dad.  We are the adults now, in this situation.  We are the parents.  We can’t afford to break down and lose our shit in public.   Sometimes I think the sanest and sharpest I’ve even been has been during times of crisis.