I’ve had enough this week. I’ve had enough emotion, and attempts to process them. I’ve had enough peopling. I’ve had enough tragedy. I’ve had enough finality. I’ve had enough revelations.

I want to crawl into a cocoon with my cats and go to sleep for a long time, but I know that’s just impossible. I have to keep going. More has happened this week than in a month before, and it’s only Wednesday evening. I still have to go to work tomorrow, and the next day, and people some more and apologize for my absence. Because the apology is what people expect to hear, regardless of what I was doing or what I was feeling.

I did some adulting. I submitted some paperwork, including my dad’s death certificate, to some relevant authorities to hopefully get the ball rolling on gaining control of his finances so I can pay myself back for his funeral arrangements and legal expenses, pay some extraneous bills that were floating around in his mountains of mail, and make sure my mom gets regular deliveries of Depend undergarments. That was all kind of a big hurdle to overcome. It cost me $1,500 in legal retainer fees to get a Certificate of Trust issued and I (somewhat ironically) nearly lost the will to live waiting for the death certificates. My credit cards are groaning under the unaccustomed strain.

I understand why these things can’t be super easy. I mean, you have to have failsafes in place to discourage scammers and identity thieves. But I wish that family members had to jump through fewer hoops. To put the living under financial duress for the dead seems counter intuitive and very…well, unfair. The dead don’t care, after all. The living are the only ones who feel anything anymore.

I saw my Mom yesterday for several hours, and I can’t tell if her dementia is progressing rapidly, or whether she was just having a bad day. Because I’m not able to see her every day, I don’t have a good idea what her baseline is, or what good and bad days look like. She definitely did not recognize me as her daughter, and her conversation skills have absolutely tanked since the last time I saw her. Her words mean nothing. The cadence of conversation is there, in that there seems to be some sentence structure. Nonsensical questions are posed, with an expectation of an answer from the fellow conversant. But the words mean nothing when strung together. She says things like: “Ja, and all the kids sometimes ladders Hans tiny houses ensibiggins. Do you find it in between?” The words are mixed English, German, and her own made up syllable mashups. Because I know her so well, I can usually tell from her question inflection whether she is seeking an opinion, or reassurance, or a definitive answer, so I try to oblige. If I don’t know what she wants, I simply ask her what she thinks.

All this is to say that for the past couple of months I’ve been toying with the idea of bringing her to Portland. I’m trying to decide whether this is selfish or not. I think that the trip out and the adjustment to a new place would be terribly difficult and stressful for her. I feel so awful that she is alone in that place, without any family, but she doesn’t seem to be aware that my dad is dead, and she doesn’t recognize me anymore. Does that mean that she is like that all the time, though? Would she recognize me on a good day? Would she feel bereft by my dad’s passing on a good day? Would she benefit from regular visits by me several times per week? What if I could bring her so near me that I could stop in all the time? Would there be times that she would be aware that her daughter was there and find comfort in that?

Or, is it better for her to be surrounded by relatively familiar faces in a place she knew with my Dad? She doesn’t seem to have any concept of time anymore, so I know that if she did recognize me at some point, she wouldn’t know if she saw me last on the previous day, or last week, or last year. By leaving her in that place, am I denying her humanity? If she could voice her opinion, would she rather be near me? Does that matter?

If I leave her in that place and see her four or five times per year, am I writing her off as dead?

My mom as I knew her is mostly gone, but this person is a human being who has needs and feels things. She was so confused on this visit. In between conversation snippets, I would see her face tense in concentration, her eyes narrow and lips purse as though she was trying desperately to figure out where she was, who she was, and what was going on. The important things, to my mind, are that she feels safe, is treated with dignity and kept comfortable, is properly medicated to reduce stress (she’s on antidepressants…I don’t mean keep her drugged), and is pain and worry free. Without question, I want to do what is right for her. It is terribly important to me that I am not doing what is right for ME.

Maybe I should talk to a memory care specialist about this. I should also reach out to her primary caregiver to get a pulse on her decline. I should also talk to a therapist for my own sake. The other option I have, of course, is to move near her. After all that chatter in my last post about never going backward, I might actually check online for jobs in the area and see what I can do in that regard. Is it fair to me to uproot myself again, though? My dad tried to make me feel guilty for moving to Portland (“you moved even further away from your parents”). I mean, I was in Albuquerque before this, and the difference in flight time to Denver is literally an hour and 20 minutes or so. But it’s not the same as next door. I get that.

My mom may also need to move again. I think this memory care facility can only care for her up to a certain point. Maybe that will be the time to move her closer to me. I’ll have to ask about that to confirm, as well.

I’m tired. I’m so tired, I feel a little like sobbing. The whiskey in this place tastes terrible. The music is even worse; lots of 80’s glam rock and folksy pop crap. I think right now we’re listening to Foreigner, which weirdly reminds me of my mom.* Grief is isolating. Weird grief like I’m experiencing about my dad feels even more isolating: most people seem to grieve for people that they love, but I’m learning about navigating grief for someone I didn’t. Worry is isolating, and draining.

I’m so lucky that I have this writing outlet to quiet the thought loops and calm the soul, but if “Romeo and Juliet” comes on the speakers, I’m fucking out of here (if you’ve read one of my past posts, you might know why). Apropos of nothing, if they play absolutely anything by Bob Dylan, I will hurl myself off the nearest cliff in protest, just on principle.

*Foreigner’s 4 was one of the first cassette tapes I ever owned (the very first were Devo’s Freedom of Choice and Hall and Oates’ H2O) and I remember my mom and I did aerobics to it in the living room when I was about 12 years old.