We are here

I am trying to find the words and I just keep coming up short. I want to find them, I do. To tell everyone how I am feeling but it is just, hard. There is no clear picture. It is all fog. We are losing, we are losing her. I was up there for a time and the lovely moments were fewer than the challenging and tragic moments. The tears well up as I write this, but I know, in my core, that we are losing her and soon. It is foolish to presume that I can prepare for this. There is no level of preparation that will make me ready for the hurt, the anguish, and the emptiness that is going to come from this. My visit was busy. It was filled with cooking, cleaning, laundry... dealing with a shit-apocalypse and then of course a butt-ton of snow. The time I had my father is always heartwarming. He was my first "person" and still has that allocation in my brain of being my person and yet this visit I saw his frailty. I felt aches in my bones... time is a bastard but all the same, it presses on in wonderous and horrific glory. I am seeing the worry and the wariness in him. He is forgetting things, he is crying, he is trapped and yet... it is a labour of love he takes on, even when his love spews vitriol, literal and figurative shit onto the floor. I sit next to him and hold his hand, I meet him halfway to show him I care but it never feels enough. 

My sister and I feel the same and yet our responses to our feelings are entirely different. I saw a side of her last night that I hadn't seen. She shared. She told me that she feels the same guilt that I do. She is angry though, angrier than I have ever seen her. She lashes out to whatever will catch it and it typically is me. It wounds me as I too am fragile right now. I feel everything and yet nothing. I try to focus and I cannot. I look around and see all of the tasks I need to complete and cannot bring myself to do. I feel a weight that is hard to carry. The guilt of not being there, but when I am there, the guilt of not taking care of my family as my mother once did. It is a lose-lose scenario that I cannot seem to reconcile. I want to be there, I want to care for my father as my focus has shifted. By caring for my mother I indeed care for my father... but if I solely focus on her, my father seems lost in the shuffle, lost in the minutia of pills, meals, chores, and vigilance to keep her on the up and up when in reality she is steadily on the decline. 

I feel the tears behind my eyes as I write this but I cannot seem to expel them. I am trying to get it out but it just seems trapped under forms, contingencies, and protocols... Talking to 6 more people a day to make sure mom is getting the absolute best care and advocating harder than I ever have before. I understand how carrying impending grief wains and harms, it hurts, like cancer, it wounds without mercy or consideration. The slow-moving car accident analogy where you get to watch in horror as metal tears through everything. The same force is tearing through my mother's brain, it is slow, it is torturous and yet it is her. This isn't some foreign object killing her, this is something that she has created. She, unbeknownst to her created her own demise which when I ponder on it, nearly cripples me. The last day I was there it was hard to find the humour. Normally, my sister and I have a dark sense of humour that gets us through, but that day I could not find it. Like the scene in the princess bride where Count Rugen sucks 1 year of Westley's life away, I feel like my smile, my spark has been sucked from me unceremoniously. I am trying to regain it, to find it... I am trying, but I feel defeated. 

The hardest shock to the system is learning where you are in relation to where you thought you were. Reality is a bitch sometimes, and so are nurses who present you with DNR forms without explanation or any guidance. I am so thankful for the support we have been receiving from hospice. I am so thankful for them. Having Brooke sit on the phone with me while I uncontrollably sob, or meetings at the house to figure out what our next steps are only to find out they are very very hard ones, to be met with hands to hold through this part is a godsend. I understand Brooke doing what she does as it must be a labour of love and her calling. She is exceptional and incredible and I admire her for her passion to care for those and show compassion when many would focus on the destination rather than the journey.