Now I Get It

I've never understood how someone could murder a family member.

Until now.

There is no way for me to tell this without making myself look very bad but I feel there must be others out there in the same situation that I can help.

As many of you are aware, we are taking care of my mother who is under the care of Hospice while now living with us. She could no longer take care of herself alone so we did what family does and we brought her over to our house where we could keep an eye on her easier. We are also dealing with a nineteen year old dog who is mostly blind, fully deaf, and increasingly incontinent and delirious.

Since Thanksgiving morning my mother has been with us and there is no doubt she has begun to take her final journey here on earth one. Not unlike our dog, she is mostly blind, nearly fully deaf, and increasingly incontinent. For fun she has long bouts of hallucinations and is quiet as a church mouse during the day when things are loud and hectic but loudly chatty and moaning in pain at night when we are trying to sleep.

To give you a fifteen minute snapshot of our day, here is what happened yesterday afternoon between 3:15 and 3:30.

Linda had just let the dog out at 3:00 where she walked around for ten minutes and did nothing. She came back in as I was closing up my office. Around that time my mother started stirring and making noises so I went in to check on her. She wanted something to drink so I went to get her water. Upon my return I tried to get her to sit up but she couldn't hold herself up without help.

I called for Linda to help me hold her up while I gave her the glass of water with a straw. At 95 she has no idea how to use one and after a minute of futility I took the straw out and told her to just drink from the glass. She choked down about a shot glass full and said she needed to go to the bathroom. The bathroom is across the hall from her room, about fifteen steps from her bed.

She shakily stood there and said hurry up. I told her that she needed to move her feet in order to go and she shuffled her way to the bathroom , barely in time, with Linda helping me drag her. (I won't even get into the whole scene of she and me in the bathroom helping her get her pull-ups down and sitting her on the toilet. I'll leave that for my therapy sessions later in life.)

As she is sitting there she is falling forward and I'm trying to get her to sit up as she is mumbling that she can't because her head is too heavy. Meanwhile I hear Linda yell, "goddammit Ellie", and she leaves the doorway to head towards the kitchen where the dog that refused to go pee outside decided the kitchen floor was the perfect spot and then sat in it.

So now Linda is cleaning up that mess while I'm trying to get my mother off the toilet, to the sink to wash her hands where she is adamantly denying she needs to do so. After almost drying her hands she grabs my arms as I attempt to walk her back to the bed. Once again she doesn't seem to understand she needs to move her feet for this to happen and she is starting to fall forward as dead weight. I force her to lift her head and push her upper body back to over her feet and we start again moving.

Forty seconds later we have covered the fifteen steps and she is back on the bed where I now have to feed her because she can't operate a fork and then try to get her to take her night time pill. This takes another five minutes and finally at 3:30 we are done and she is back lying down in bed where she tells me to make sure I take the pencils and paper to the kids in the living room so they can play. There are no kids or pencils and paper. Imagine that scene five times a day and you have an idea of what we are dealing with.

Now I get why people kill their family.

The stress, the frustration, and the anger can get over whelming. Nobody is happy with life the way it is right now. Once the dog stops eating we can at least put her out of her misery but for my mother we have to let her life deteriorate until her body shuts down. She is miserable and it is increasingly more difficult for us to help her. In her fractions of minutes of lucidity during the day she asks me to put her to sleep and I tell her that if I could without going to jail I would.

I gratefully hear from friends and family kind words for what we are doing to help my mother but it doesn't make it easier to take care of her. As kids we never think that we are someday going to have to take care of our parents and when it happens it hits like a slap across the face. Throw in the fact we never had kids and our preparation to do this task is woefully lacking in experience. At least we had some experience with Linda's mom a few years ago but she only needed 100% help for a few days.

I write this not to complain or to generate back pats but to let others know that they are not alone with helping our parents. We know what we signed up for and we've pretty much known we would be doing this since we got married, but you never can really prepare until thrust into the mess.

She has only weeks left, we think, with us so we roll up our sleeves each day and get back at it trying to make her as comfortable as possible. Thankfully Hospice is here to give us the support and materials we need to help her.

I hear her moaning in the next room so it looks like our new day is beginning.