My father is confined to bed. His condition is deteriorating fast and now it's about keeping him comfortable. I'm up here to support him and allow my sister to get a bit of respite. My life is on hold for a while as I'll likely be coming up here.
We're maybe a strange family to be providing so much assistance to our parents in their twilight years. We're more close-knit than I thought we would be. I'm on day four of spending time in my dad's room to supervise my mother being here. She cannot be in the room alone with him because she has her own condition.
They cannot take care of each other.
I've thought about death most of my life. In the presidential election of 1980, my brother told me we would all die if Reagan was elected. There would be a nuclear war, a concept I did not know about and then internalized. I grew up thinking death was a moment away.
Now I'm sitting in a care home in Pennsylvania where my parents will most certainly die. They're at the end of their life and my role is to help be care of the care. I've dropped everything to do this and I don't know when I'll resume my normal life.
I am increasingly questioning that normal life. I do not know if I want to remain in Charlottesville. I find it to be a place where I do not fit in and I want to explore other places. I want to feel alive.
Yet, who knows how I will in a bit? At the moment I'm keeping an eye on the two of them as they wait for their dinner to be delivered. We had a stressful moment about an hour or so ago when there was a fire drill. My dad cannot leave the bed, and they were going to evacuate him and put him in a chair, and that would have caused a problem. Can he be evacuated in the hospital bed if it comes to that? If he is moved, the chances of him fainting increase. And soon he may faint and may not come back.
I think about my life and how it seems empty when I'm around my parents. I will likely never have another romantic relationship again because I do not know how and because I always end up being attracted to people with no interest in me. But, my life isn't empty because it's rich with writing and music and a love of the simple joys of being human.
I'm writing this at the moment because I can't work and I am concerned that this time around, I'll not want to come back from a break. I'll want to move on and do something else, even though I'm old and washed up by other people's standards.
The world is changing fast as authoritarianism takes hold and the America way of life I thought I know is being erased by those who want power and those who want to avoid persecution. What will things be like in a year? Will I still be a caretaker, or will my parents have passed on?
Do I want to be alive until their age? The answer is no. I'd rather die young and take risks than sit around watching television. I want to study and I want to write and I want to exist and I want to do what I can to try to remind people of the importance of being alive.
But honestly, I'm losing interest. Especially when the odds of being annihilated in a nuclear war are much higher than they've been since the Cold War. I will live in the moment and try to be happy, but I'm fairly certain there's little to be optimistic about.
This is what happens to your brain when you've been in a care home for four days and there are six more to go.
Comments