When I was a child, I had a fever

[cyrano]

It seems an appropriate time to discuss this; it's the dark of night, and that's when the monsters come out.
My mom has been managing more or less constant pain and physical/medical problems for thirty or forty years now. One of the reasons that I didn't follow the family to Idaho was that I would have ended up being a caretaker--the devoted child who does nothing but work and care for the elderly parents until they die. And I sometimes feel cripplingly guilty that I'm not willing to do that--to essentially return the favor. If they had stayed in Oregon, odds are likely that I would never have had sufficient impetus to remove myself from the situation. Anyway. She's not getting any better, and at this point much of what she's dealing with is damage and side effects caused by what were the current 'Modern Miracles of Medicine' back in the seventies and eighties.
Last night she called me because they're pretty sure my dad has Alzheimer's. His mother had it, and we took care of her for five years as she slowly degenerated. For the last four years, she had no idea who we were, and by the time she passed on, in my mind she had already been long dead. Which also made me feel amazingly guilty. I have a lot of issues with feeling guilty about the things I do in order to survive. Because they're harsh and they're not nice, and it's hard to admit that sometimes I'm not nice. Like knowing that my mom can't stand Idaho, and that the people out there are generally stupid and like it that way, and that out of our family I'm pretty much the only person she can talk to, and then choosing to avoid contact most of the time because it takes so much energy.
They told my dad that there was this medicine, and it would make the disease progress a little slower, and it was only going to cost $150 a month, and he's decided that they can't afford it. And they probably can't--Mom's Avon circuit is about the only income they have at this point, and it doesn't even make a dent in the tax debt they've accrued from being lower middle class during the Reagan Era.
So together their health will continue to decline and it doesn't look like there's any options available that look even remotely pleasant. And odds are pretty good that, given heredity, I'm going to end up in a similar situation in time. Slowly and painfully wringing the last bitter brackish drops out of my life. It makes me wonder what it would be like to drive into the median or off an overpass. There are no happy endings left, and I wish the Goblin King would come and take me away. Right now.

EDIT: It occurs to me that this sounds more suicidal than it is. I'm not planning to hurt myself. I'm not planning to find some romantic way to end it all. I'm just not looking forward to living out a life of misery and pain and gradual, inexorable degradation and attrition.

Comments

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

*hugs* I'd be sad to have coyote time cut short, and I know others feel the same. So what if the very end might not be happy? It just might, and there's a whole lot of in-between opportunity for happy in the meantime.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I keep trying to remember that--I will reassure you, I'm not currently looking for a way out, I'm just having trouble seeing a way around/out and it's really hard to keep looking when that's all I see.