Losing it
By M on Tuesday 27 February 2007, 09:16 - Journal - Permalink
Dad called: 'Mike, it's dad. I just wanted to tell you I'm an idiot.' He hung
up. A minute later he called back, 'Sorry, I ended abruptly. Your mum's blaming
me for everything. I don't know...I am an idiot, apparently.'
''Nothing new about that,' I said
'No. That's normal these days.'
'OK, dad. I'll talk to the doctor about it.'
'Good. I'm glad about that,' and click, he hung up again.
Mum's aggression and cantankerousness are well and truly operational once more. Later today I will speak to Dr Humerus about what to do next.
Meanwhile, Rachel has made an appointment to see Lewsey Gardens, a large nursing home and hostel that Sophie, from ACAT and Lana, our case manager, had been pushing back around November. Greg has agreed to go with her. I'm invited too, but I don't particularly want to see the place. If my brother and sister like it then, as they have both seen the Russell Retirement Village, the one place that we all felt was right for mum and dad, then I will accept their decision about whether to put ourselves on the Lewsey waiting list. there may well be deeper reasons for my lack of 'interest'.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend yesterday. She began a new relationship a few weeks ago, and is so in love that she is absolutely terrified - to the point of distraction - of losing her new boyfriend. So terrified in fact, that she at moments considers the relationship too much of an emotional risk, and wonders whether it is better to end it before the chances of getting hurt and the depth of the potential hurt increase. It is a strange self-denying kind of psychology, but one I can understand. On the one hand it says 'I don't want to climb because I might fall', but it also says something like 'I am so afraid of dying I would rather be dead'.
While I was talking to her there was another little idea without a name flitting around the back of my mind. It was that we are so afraid of something bad happening to mum and dad that we are thinking of taking away everything that is theirs - the bulk of their belongings, their home, their routines, their identities. thier pets and their illusory independence - and there is not much worse that could happen than that. I think of people who are on television every summer here in Australia, people who have lost their houses, and sometimes pets, to bush fires. They don't take the philosophical position of 'well, the good thing is that we can't lose the house now its gone!' They are just shattered by the experience. I expect mum and dad to be shattered when they lose everything too, though they may be much less articulate about it.
''Nothing new about that,' I said
'No. That's normal these days.'
'OK, dad. I'll talk to the doctor about it.'
'Good. I'm glad about that,' and click, he hung up again.
Mum's aggression and cantankerousness are well and truly operational once more. Later today I will speak to Dr Humerus about what to do next.
Meanwhile, Rachel has made an appointment to see Lewsey Gardens, a large nursing home and hostel that Sophie, from ACAT and Lana, our case manager, had been pushing back around November. Greg has agreed to go with her. I'm invited too, but I don't particularly want to see the place. If my brother and sister like it then, as they have both seen the Russell Retirement Village, the one place that we all felt was right for mum and dad, then I will accept their decision about whether to put ourselves on the Lewsey waiting list. there may well be deeper reasons for my lack of 'interest'.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend yesterday. She began a new relationship a few weeks ago, and is so in love that she is absolutely terrified - to the point of distraction - of losing her new boyfriend. So terrified in fact, that she at moments considers the relationship too much of an emotional risk, and wonders whether it is better to end it before the chances of getting hurt and the depth of the potential hurt increase. It is a strange self-denying kind of psychology, but one I can understand. On the one hand it says 'I don't want to climb because I might fall', but it also says something like 'I am so afraid of dying I would rather be dead'.
While I was talking to her there was another little idea without a name flitting around the back of my mind. It was that we are so afraid of something bad happening to mum and dad that we are thinking of taking away everything that is theirs - the bulk of their belongings, their home, their routines, their identities. thier pets and their illusory independence - and there is not much worse that could happen than that. I think of people who are on television every summer here in Australia, people who have lost their houses, and sometimes pets, to bush fires. They don't take the philosophical position of 'well, the good thing is that we can't lose the house now its gone!' They are just shattered by the experience. I expect mum and dad to be shattered when they lose everything too, though they may be much less articulate about it.
Comments
It was a few years ago now, but I remember when my mother and I put my great-aunt from the other side of our family into a home.
It was slightly different she was physically frail but relatively mentally alert,and incapable of living by herself (she kept breaking large bones).
I think I was on the point of going to university so I was encouraged to appropriate things like cutlery as pretty much everything was getting sold off in one big lot.
Even knowing that she had no further use for it, and even knowing that the alternative of not taking a few knives, forks and a tin-opener would make no difference to the estate, it still felt like stealing. Stealing in a useful way (I still have most of them now!) and I'm quite sure if we'd have been able to have the conversation, she would have approved, but still stealing.
Of course worse still was our knowledge and her ignorance that she would never see that flat, those books and that grand piano etc. again.
I still think it was the right decision made at the right time, but then again I still think I was stealing and effectively jumping on her grave whilst she was still alive.
I never had time for Leibniz's excuse of the 'best of all possible worlds' for theism's deficiencies but as a rationale for decision-making it's not bad - although as always the devil's in the detail.
Whatever decision you (and everyone else) take is going to have negative consequences, and hindsight is always 20:20, but as long as the decision is made with the aim of the 'best of all possible worlds' and based on the current evidence, it is de facto the right one.
I had a comment, something about dwindling awareness vs. changing someone else's field of awareness without their cooperation, which has so woven itself into Conner's comment that I no longer remember mine...I think it was covered with elan by Conner's, although I recall that I hadn't thought to make a judgment on what is right. I suspect I would be one of the members of the bush-fire-burned families who don't appear on TV because they shrug off the ashen remnants of their pre-bush-fire lives and move on. Not sure this is a good idea, but it's what I'd do. I like the leveling effect of catastrophy, though.
It is befuddling, the urge to take away in order to preserve. I hadn't previously thought about it in quite the way you and Conner expressed it.
I'm finding something delightful in your "I'm an idiot" conversation with your dad. I like the way you handled it.
Dr. Dan Gottlieb, a local radio psychologist, used to refer to “the dignity of risk.” He was talking about bringing up children. The idea was that you need to respect your children enough to let them take their own chances and possibly get into their own trouble.
I’ve thought about this again lately with regard to my parents. It’s clear that a lot of the urge to get them “placed” is to remove them from a context that is far from dignified. Life in their house is sometimes chaotic, sometimes messy, sometimes weird, and very often undignified. And so, to protect them from that, one thinks of “taking away everything that is theirs,” as you say, and putting them somewhere for safekeeping.
Right now I still feel that by staying in their own home they are continuing to experience the dignity of risk, the human-ness of autonomy. The difficult part will be knowing when that line is crossed into the realm where they would actually prefer to be more protected and less challenged. I don’t expect that they will necessarily be able to articulate it when the time comes.