Growing up I always knew our home was different than the other homes in our average middle-class neighborhood. Sure, our lawn was trimmed and well maintained. Sure, we played the games all neighborhood children played, hot box, monkey in the middle, freeze tag and other fun games. We rode bikes, played t-ball, joined Boy and Girl scouts. We were clean, WelL dressed and from the outside all was well. But our house held secrets one of which was our mother's mental illness. Everyone in our neighborhood knew, they just never said anything out loud to us. When mom would have her bi-yearly breakdown they would look out for my brother and me, feed us, watch us, treat us just a little bit kinder. I think they figured we needed it but to us crazy was normal.
In the 80s mom got better. She really wasn't cured, it was medication related. I was a mom then and so busy that an almost normal mom was okay by me. And life marched on with mom having an occasional downward spiral. She'd go back in for treatment and we'd get her back, a little paler, a little calmer, a little more normal.
But now normal is a ghost, we think we see it and then it's gone leaving us to wonder if we just imagined it. Dementia + loopy = Shirley. She screams for Ray, there is no Ray. She talks to the corner of her room. She cries for her mother. She curses like a biker. She accuses me of stealing her pants, of killing the cat, of hiding her shoes. She thinks my brother is my dad, she says he took her food and won't let her eat. She tells random staff and visitors to shut the hell up. It hurts to see but a ranting and raving Shirley is better than a sleeping and out of it Shirley. Sounds good doesn't it? Truth is, a sleeping Shirley is a better Shirley.
Yesterday she looked up at me and said "I am dying. I am going to die." And then we both cried. Her because crying is her go to emotional outlet, me because I cry for who she was, the mother I had, and the mother I wish I'd had.
DIfficult to respond, as usual. But I hope you know that I wish you well even though my words are clumsy and clouded by the fact that your experience is well out of my ken. It's something that I do not know if I could stand, something that, if I myself were to receive comments from strangers who have no conception of what I am going through, might merely arouse contempt in me, if not downright anger.
ReplyDeleteAgainst that background, I can only report experiences of my own and will choose that of my experience with pets. For me, the loss of a pet is a great loss, fills me with sadness.
When faced with this sadness, a resource pops up in me - without my control. I start to distance myself. It's self-protection I guess. In order to tend for the pet, I find that I can only behave as normal by actively thinking of the comforts I will still have when the pet is gone. In this way, by being completely selfish, I am able to function in the way that I know my pet requires.
The pet, perhaps a dog in great discomfort, does not want me to emote all over the place. It only wants me to be my usual self. If I am afraid or guilty or sad - it knows and will suffer . It yearns for me, as someone who has always treated it well, to be absolutely normal. To say the usual things like "You horrid animal, what are you up to now?"
And it replies by wagging it's tail. No matter how bad it feels, it understands that the world is still turning, that everything will turn out OK in the end.
This.