It is easier to be angry at my mother and what her choices have wrought than to be angry at the disease and what it wreaks on a daily basis. "The people who were here", she just said to me, struggling to put her thoughts together. This is really just all a long road (who knows how long?) to the end of the journey and it's exhausting. As we would say in Trinidad, "Ah bun" (translated: I'm burnt out). Whether I spend my energy in anger or in dealing with this situation, it matters not. The end result is weariness.
Given my physical and emotional weariness, I've decided to take a break from writing for a while, partly because I don't know that it's really helping anyone for me to be urging, coaxing or cajoling people into having discussions that no one wants to have and partly because I'm just so very tired.
It's clear to me, and has been for some time now, that these end of life discussions that I urge are not conversations folks want to have. The evidence provided by my own family shows me that. I get that, but the situation in which we find ourselves (and we are not without some resources, just not nearly enough) is not one folks want to experience either. I recommend the short term discomfort of the conversation over the long term, slow-moving destruction of the effects of silence, but I'm not real sure that message has been received and acted upon. At any rate I am now so tired that, and I hate to say it, I don't even have the energy to care.
What happened? The usual: things to be organized and no one to organize them but me. I suppose it's my fault that so much falls to me. I tend to see a need well before anyone else does and I move to fill the need. My mantra seems to be "No point leaving it there waiting for Godot. He's not coming". That approach has its downside and it's called exhaustion.
Ayn Rand wrote a book titled "Atlas Shrugged". In Greek lore, Atlas held the world on his shoulders. As my mother's personal Atlas, I feel a shrug coming on. My shrug starts with this blog. Who knows what else will get shrugged off? I'll probably be back, perhaps very soon, but for right now I'm taking a moment of silence. I may return to writing on my other blog Meanderings of My Mind, which has nothing to do with AD care-giving or money management or any of this stuff that fills so much of my life. Perhaps all I need is an intellectual break. We shall see. Until I figure it out for sure, would the last person to leave the room please switch off the lights? Thanks!
