Dad died four years ago. It was kind of a shock. Mom was overweight and had several ongoing health problems. For years we had all figured she would be the first to go and had steeled ourselves for that eventuality. Dads death took us all by surprise; kind of a body blow to the psyche leaving us stunned and at a loss.
I could not give the eulogy for him because I was holding my mother through-out the service. Sometimes I regret not doing so. Being a somewhat private person, sometimes I am grateful I did not have to. Mostly I am glad I was of some comfort to Mom.
Mom continues to live with my sister. She has dementia and now we watch her health and mental well-being deteriorate on an almost daily basis and I see her as she is, and remember her as she was and sometimes I lose it completely. She still knows most of us in the immediate family but her mind is caught in a continuous loop with a surreal, jumbled collection of past events and no future.
Her days are spent going from bedroom to living room chair to spend the day watching television cartoons, all the while repeatedly expressing the longing to be back in her own home, a physical impossibility, and vacillating between the heartache of knowing the only man in her life has died and the almost unbearable heartache of being convinced he ran off with another woman; this even though he died in her arms. I do not want to lose her but sometimes I look at her and ask myself if her existence can truly be called living and I question whether or not my desires to have her around are not just selfishness and question whether it would be more merciful for her to pass peacefully in her sleep; a desire she herself has expressed.
Guilt and anguish are sometimes indistinguishable.
As she would say: “Such is life with all its cares….......”