These Subject lines used to always be song lyrics.

[cyrano]

I'm spending six weeks caretaking for my mom--my sister could use the time off--and I'm again going over my thoughts about my own future and how much pain and disability I'm willing to tolerate versus how desperate I am to cling to continuing to exist. It's pretty hypothetical still, and most of the time I'm pretty willing to let it exist somewhere in the future. But it's hard to keep it as a clinical consideration when it feels like I'm living in the same house as that future. If she's careful, Mom can still move from the bathroom door to the toilet, but she's constantly in pain and getting out of the house onto the back porch today was pretty much all we could handle. But at least she got outside, which is something I've been hoping she'd be up to for a month now.

I've had stretches of 'this is not fun any more' in my life, but there's always the idea that it's probably going to change given time. How long do I tolerate 'this is not fun any more' when there are no options for things getting better and it's just trying to stave off things getting any worse?

Comments

[missroserose]

I visited my grandmother last month, who's been in and out of the hospital with heart failure and is on oxygen. It was a little surreal, because she was clearly pretty frail but just as clearly unwilling to accept that this was probably the end; she kept talking about how she was hoping I'd visit again and she'd get to meet Brian. And yet I think she knew, regardless; there was something haunting about the way she watched me go from the garage door.

I'm just grateful she's still mentally sharp. Her mother died from Alzheimer's and from what I know of my grandmother that possibility would be a special kind of hell.

[cyrano]

Was this part of the trip to LA? I'm glad you got to see her.

Can confirm, caring for somebody through Alzheimer's is really fucking hard on you. Mom sometimes gets confused and has trouble tracking multistep processes, but she's still very present. And full of curse words.

[missroserose]

Nah, I had a separate trip to Florida for a couple of days. It went better than I expected, though dealing with my aunt remains one of the more exhausting aspects of family gatherings.