Well my aunt left today. She's a nurse by profession and has been staying here helping with my mother. By 'helping', I mean 'doing pretty much everything'. That includes balling out the hospice nurses for not doing their job to her satisfaction. It was awesome, and they were stepping lively around here after that.
So we sat up last night and talked about her. I talked in a hushed tone, but everyone else talked pretty loud, and we were one room over, so I felt kind of bad about that. But my brother had similar nightmare episodes living with her that I did. The difference was that he didn't have any other decent family to go to for normalcy. Apparently mom's side of the family was totally screwed up beyond belief. I got a lot of much more reliable perspective from my aunt. She seems open, honest, and remarkably less fucked up than most of the rest of that family.
I realized that my swiss cheese memory is nice. I don't remember too many specific incidents, only general behaviors. I used to hate this when I would fight with my old ex-girlfriend. She used to lay into me with everything I had done since the beginning of the relationship, and I would try to respond, but I would have no particular incidents I could recall. But in this case, it works. My brother has tons and tons of very specific memories about incidents, and I'm glad I'm not carrying that stuff around. Although maybe it just means I've been wired in a certain way and won't ever be able to fix it, because it's no longer anchored to anything I could work through. Who knows. Maybe not remembering them means I worked through them already. But all of this "working through issues" stuff seems a little silly when you're old, like me. It's funny how your parents can make you feel like a kid no matter what age you are.
Oh and now mom is famous. I was going to keep this semi-anonymous, but what the fuck. here's a link to the article if you want to see it: http://www.demingheadlight.com/deming-news/ci_22475167/my-bff
Mom would absolutely hate this. She hates anyone knowing anything about her, or anyone talking about her, or anything else like this. Apparently she had cancer for 2 years before she even told me anything. This girl was coming and visiting her frequently, and even wanted to come when she was really bad. I let her come in the other night and tried to warn her that mom was in bad shape. The girl left crying. I'm not going to tell anyone, though. I'm sure the news will rattle back to the family sooner or later. An old family friend came by to see her after seeing her in the paper, which is how I found out. The girl would die if she knew how upset this would've made mom. But now she responds to almost nothing, she has trouble swallowing and tumors are growing all over her body. She barely drinks water (from the syringe we use to give her morphine) and doesn't eat at all.
And yes, I'm aware of the hypocrisy, or whatever you want to call it, regarding me blasting all sorts of shit about her in this blog.
So we sat up last night and talked about her. I talked in a hushed tone, but everyone else talked pretty loud, and we were one room over, so I felt kind of bad about that. But my brother had similar nightmare episodes living with her that I did. The difference was that he didn't have any other decent family to go to for normalcy. Apparently mom's side of the family was totally screwed up beyond belief. I got a lot of much more reliable perspective from my aunt. She seems open, honest, and remarkably less fucked up than most of the rest of that family.
I realized that my swiss cheese memory is nice. I don't remember too many specific incidents, only general behaviors. I used to hate this when I would fight with my old ex-girlfriend. She used to lay into me with everything I had done since the beginning of the relationship, and I would try to respond, but I would have no particular incidents I could recall. But in this case, it works. My brother has tons and tons of very specific memories about incidents, and I'm glad I'm not carrying that stuff around. Although maybe it just means I've been wired in a certain way and won't ever be able to fix it, because it's no longer anchored to anything I could work through. Who knows. Maybe not remembering them means I worked through them already. But all of this "working through issues" stuff seems a little silly when you're old, like me. It's funny how your parents can make you feel like a kid no matter what age you are.
Oh and now mom is famous. I was going to keep this semi-anonymous, but what the fuck. here's a link to the article if you want to see it: http://www.demingheadlight.com/deming-news/ci_22475167/my-bff
Mom would absolutely hate this. She hates anyone knowing anything about her, or anyone talking about her, or anything else like this. Apparently she had cancer for 2 years before she even told me anything. This girl was coming and visiting her frequently, and even wanted to come when she was really bad. I let her come in the other night and tried to warn her that mom was in bad shape. The girl left crying. I'm not going to tell anyone, though. I'm sure the news will rattle back to the family sooner or later. An old family friend came by to see her after seeing her in the paper, which is how I found out. The girl would die if she knew how upset this would've made mom. But now she responds to almost nothing, she has trouble swallowing and tumors are growing all over her body. She barely drinks water (from the syringe we use to give her morphine) and doesn't eat at all.
And yes, I'm aware of the hypocrisy, or whatever you want to call it, regarding me blasting all sorts of shit about her in this blog.
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