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Reflections on a crisis
Aug. 29th, 2013 03:35 pmI leave tomorrow morning to move my mother from NYC to Minnesota. I have really...complicated feelings about this: pity, frustration that she insisted on waiting until it became an emergency, dread that there are expectations I can't possible live up to, terror at the expense, exhausted anger at all the extra juggling I have to do. All of which are totally inappropriate for a dutiful daughter. And honestly, that is not who I am. I like things that can be made efficient, can be organized better, can be improved. This is why I work in IT: find a problem, try and get the problem fixed. This will not be how it is. Yet, that said, both of us work well over 40 hours a week, for making a living, for sanity, for craft. There's not a lot of room in there for a sick person whose mental acumen has begun to slip. This in turn, means more work to come up with the money to pay someone else to do what we cannot do and truly don't want to do: care giving.
The thing going around in my head, along with all this, is a notion that writer Pamela Dean puts forth in her Liavek stories. She writes about an order of aspiring suicides who live in The House of Responsible Life, if I'm remembering correctly. The protagonist is a young woman who wants to die, but acquires a cat. The cat, for all its nine lives, becomes the responsibility that she cannot abandon by dying on purpose. I am thinking about this, not because I am suicidal (though the stories were very helpful when I was having problems with depression), but because I am looking at my current responsibility that cannot be shirked and wrestling with feeling more resentful than responsible. I think this feeling will pass. I am nothing if not adaptable, and I will find a way to cope. But the initial hump is hard to get over, so I hope I find my cope soon.
That said, many, many thanks to our house/cat sitters, the friends who go with me to NY or meet me there to help and to Jana, who's committed to riding this out with me. I feel very lucky in the people in my life.
The thing going around in my head, along with all this, is a notion that writer Pamela Dean puts forth in her Liavek stories. She writes about an order of aspiring suicides who live in The House of Responsible Life, if I'm remembering correctly. The protagonist is a young woman who wants to die, but acquires a cat. The cat, for all its nine lives, becomes the responsibility that she cannot abandon by dying on purpose. I am thinking about this, not because I am suicidal (though the stories were very helpful when I was having problems with depression), but because I am looking at my current responsibility that cannot be shirked and wrestling with feeling more resentful than responsible. I think this feeling will pass. I am nothing if not adaptable, and I will find a way to cope. But the initial hump is hard to get over, so I hope I find my cope soon.
That said, many, many thanks to our house/cat sitters, the friends who go with me to NY or meet me there to help and to Jana, who's committed to riding this out with me. I feel very lucky in the people in my life.