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Jul. 25th, 2011 06:15 pmAt last my mother is moved into assisted living.
I don't have any energy left to worry about how she'll adjust or what will happen if she gets too incapacitated to stay there or what I'll do if she outlives the money.
The facility is lovely for that sort of place and, in my opinion, is a considerable step up from the slummy apartment where she lived for far, far too long. How long? At least fifty years. My sister is forty-five and I know my mother was already living in that apartment before she even met my father.
I should be sad about my mother having to leave a place where she lived for so long and raised a family, and I should be even sadder about the fact that she's so out of it that her whole life is just falling away like dead leaves -- no memories, no understanding, nothing. She spent nearly three-quarters of her life in this neighborhood and today she left it and will never see it again and she didn't even get to say goodbye.
But what I really feel sad about is the whole, long trainwreck of our misbegotten family and the bleak little drama that played out over so many years in that apartment on that street in that neighborhood, which won't ever really be over until all four of us are gone.
On the drive back my father said that he's back where he was fifty years ago, all on his own. As if nothing had happened in all that time, nothing to show for his whole life. And that is what it feels like to me too -- for him, for my mother, my sister, myself. That is what I feel sad about today. Four people in a nothing life, a nowhere life, four people running out the clock.
I don't have any energy left to worry about how she'll adjust or what will happen if she gets too incapacitated to stay there or what I'll do if she outlives the money.
The facility is lovely for that sort of place and, in my opinion, is a considerable step up from the slummy apartment where she lived for far, far too long. How long? At least fifty years. My sister is forty-five and I know my mother was already living in that apartment before she even met my father.
I should be sad about my mother having to leave a place where she lived for so long and raised a family, and I should be even sadder about the fact that she's so out of it that her whole life is just falling away like dead leaves -- no memories, no understanding, nothing. She spent nearly three-quarters of her life in this neighborhood and today she left it and will never see it again and she didn't even get to say goodbye.
But what I really feel sad about is the whole, long trainwreck of our misbegotten family and the bleak little drama that played out over so many years in that apartment on that street in that neighborhood, which won't ever really be over until all four of us are gone.
On the drive back my father said that he's back where he was fifty years ago, all on his own. As if nothing had happened in all that time, nothing to show for his whole life. And that is what it feels like to me too -- for him, for my mother, my sister, myself. That is what I feel sad about today. Four people in a nothing life, a nowhere life, four people running out the clock.