An update– Mom. Recovery. Dormancy.
Mom had her aneurysm, the first wallop to her head that precipitated all the others issues that have happened in the years since, in 2005. That took place the day before her 65th birthday. In 2011, when friends and I took her to a fancy dinner for her 71st birthday (and she asked me to please not nag her about the walker on her birthday and I relented), she broke her hip when she fell over while outside the restaurant smoking a cigarette. So, of course, when she had a fall in the bathroom recently, it was also the day before her birthday. She immediately yelled at me about her hip, which had me more frightened than otherwise, because she never knows what injury has happened to her– meaning this must be “real bad” I thought.
Fast forward a couple of days and I was told she would need complicated surgery to repair her pelvic bone, but then a day later again and I was told it had not been either bent or dislocated, just cracked and very badly bruised. I didn’t fully get it, but within less than a week after thinking I had watched my mother fall over after taking hat would end up her last step– and she was walking again in the hospital using parallel bars and the future looked far, far better quickly.
I learned that being a caregiver is very hard, but being a caregiver who is not caregiving but is on “stand by” (for lack of a better descriptor) is even more difficult on the psyche. What ended up being almost six weeks might seem to the outsider as an extended caregiving break, in reality it was six weeks of self-loathing, feeling aimless and drifting in and out of various fantasies about things I would like to be doing whether political work or simple self-driven plans that can’t be undertaken when you are spoken for. I was in a special Hell, and getting mom home became as important for my psychological resistance to blackness as it is for Mom to be where she belongs, with me, my cat Baisol and her special Mollie.
Mom’s recovery has been remarkable, she seemed to get that working her leg was the route home from the off; If I asked her when I visited to show me herself walking with her walker, she got almost too motivated, and I watched her bubble up with energy, knowing that walking got her home and that she was wanted home, too. In some extremely important ways my mother has demonstrated to me just how much having a real home to return to with love in it is everything to her. It has crystallized that reality to me, and it has made the work since she returned home that much easier. I genuinely can see, feel and touch how much more than food is what I can nourish her with.
The long and short of it is this: She can move almost as well as before she had her break, and by the Spring when the weather begins to cooperate with our plans to spend time outside again, her leg will likely be as strong as before, and she will be able to do little walks along boardwalks by the lake, take steps on short staircases with help, so we can go beyond them and explore new things. In a sentence: She will be able to do what she loves and not lose her ability to live as high a quality of life as we have managed the last few years.
So, changing directions now, I’m taking time away from writing this website up, in part because I don’t even know if anyone is reading it. And I’ve learned more about the horrors that await elders who are just now heading into the era of their lives where they depend on younger people to have a conscience and act with compassion when it is needed the most.
Perhaps everything in this website is written poorly or something else, but I’ve been writing about social justice issues and organizing around the same for more than 2 decades. I’ve done anti-war work, Palestinian solidarity work and climate justice, tar sands focused work as well. Every issue that one works on will have different roadbumps and more. But I can say this: I’ve never put down this much effort into trying to make a case for social justice work to such utter crickets. And the work at home is already exhausting. I began to write these stories, make radio shows and more in order to try and make it so there is more than just personal issues going on, but that there can be a light blasted into the darkness that is entirely a choice as a society. And, for the life of me, I’ve never felt like these efforts were in vain before.
Perhaps it simply goes like this: Activists who do the leg work are usually younger, mid 30’s would be ‘old’ in most organizing spaces, and this has to do with being able to take time away from other things– family, career– to push an issue to resolution or at least social consciousness. But I am 43, and I am VERY young for a full-time, limited-to-no assistance caregiver in the first world. So who will give a shit and do something about helping elders live in their dignity, if those who do the social justice work are blissfully (and guardedly so, often) ignorant about end of life issues? Those who get it are doing 36 hour a day, 8 day weeks already, and the rest of society wants nothing to do with even thinking about it.
It’s like advocating for animal rights in a society that has never known a single pet in their lives. No one will connect to it. In several ways, in fact, this is a particularly strong analogy. Who wants to really think about it? And when will society evolve to a humane place where the increased profits of extra torture we subject animals to be considered something previous generations got wrong, can never live down– but also can never be repeated?
I digress. I began the idea of writing these stories out, and trying to lay ground work for others to do things that may help this society be more moral, reactive to human suffering before the ‘grey tsunami’ that is hitting the health system slowly as we speak. I am simply not used to working to get a point of view out and feeling it was getting to absolutely nowhere. I am certain that my own winter-based depression is making this a more extreme problem than it actually is, but in reality I have put a lot of energy I barely had at all into trying to get this going. I have spent the last year and a few months getting myself clear of SSRI meds, and a major reason for trying to get this going is simple: I’m a fighter. I’ve been struggling for social justice all my adult life, and this is only the hardest, most important, most directly human and exhausting version of it I have undertaken.
I also freely admit that my own, biggest, non-Donna motivation of all to do this is because I don’t want to be someone who can’t. I don’t want to be that guy, who rants about saving the world while abandoning his family, who tells others to struggle hard but who asks strangers to do the heavy lifting with his own mother– to be a revolutionary who speaks about the spiritual, “I need to dance” aspects of a revolutionary movement as the most important– while simultaneously not paying attention to the same spirit in my own mother, and instead focus on protecting her body alone, left in a room to stare at a wall. This, of course, developed over the first several months of mom being home, even though I had made no decision to live like this in open ended fashion. Each day of her confusion and fear of it, I saw what difference being around myself, her home, her cats and the “you belong here” vibe that goes with made. I can’t look Mom in the eye when those eyes know who I am and say
“You don’t matter anymore, because there is a value stamp on your head and this society has reduced it to clear.”
But the energy to do the work of writing all of these things, it’s draining with so little coming back. The radio show I got help in producing gave me a level of energy and joy in hearing the same from my mother. It was and is a remarkable testament to her spirit, but it went nowhere. I don’t have the energy when I’m already working 150+ hours in the week with someone who does not ‘grow’ and the work of DL has become a burden. I get no sense that it has made any difference to others lives, and I only get anxious about “getting it out there” now. I can’t afford to have this anxiety.
I hope this changes, I want to contribute to something more than “just” my wonderful Mom being happy when she needs it. I want to put energy into helping elders beyond this home, to getting this society to stop with the cruelty we mete out to elders now that is like Child labour of yore. But I can’t do this not knowing if its little more than me humouring myself, while North American society– we have the gadgets and better facilities thanks to money, there is nowhere I can think of that is more cruel to elders than here– with my energy that already doesn’t exist bleeding into this without any glimpse of the idea that it matters.
In a paragraph: I have done multiple issues of agitation over the years. Some are hard going, with tremendous push back, like Palestinian human rights. When doing that, you get reinvigorated constantly by the beautiful people who also refuse genocide, emotional manipulations, government persecution, smear campaigns and more. You can ‘take it’ because you have solidarity. You have sisters and brothers of struggle on the issue. You have moments like seeing the historically reactionary CFS taking on BDS.
I falsely assumed that because everyone has parents everyone would want better for them, and be willing to look deep within both themselves and critiquing society for how awful what we currently do is. And I will not give up trying to make that point, and will not surrender this fight, either. I have “youth and health privilege”– I can leave mom and drop talking about this tomorrow, improve my health (maybe) over time, and improve my financial situation in a matter of weeks. But so what? I could get rid of my cat, too– I’ve never accepted that people adopt animals and then later say “You are not convenient any more,” before leaving them elsewhere. How could I do that to my mother, if I can’t to Baisol?
When I “went live” with Donnas Lessons, I thought “Okay, here we go. I don’t know how this struggle is going to go at all, but it starts now. Let’s see where this goes.” And I did this and that, and pushed out more and more energy. Doing it and getting almost no real world feedback, especially now several months later, and heading into Winter more every day, has sapped me and made this feel like an obligation I created for anxiety for me with no purpose.
I can’t and won’t give up on my vision: A time in the future where people sit around and scoff at the evils of prior generations treatment of the elderly with dementia in much the same way we now look at the culture of silence for Church/priest molestation of kids, child labour, or “insane asylums” for the mentally ill. But this project has made me feel even more anxious about just how bad this situation is on a societal level, how people just don’t want to go there. I can’t let that continue with myself, I am going to change what happens with this project because I am too spent to do work that I see zero point in, at least in the current moment.
I just want to quietly enjoy mom playing her Xmas songs, to listen to them and enjoy her most honest of smiles while she plays. Watch bad TV together, and good hockey. Make her meals and help her give cats treats– so they climb all over her. She got back into that some months ago, and through doing it the exact same way without exception a few times a day, Mom now knows where the cat treats are within her reach without my being there. So Mollie can ask Mom for a treat, and Mom can smile and give to her. Mom has always wanted desperately to “be useful” to others, it’s the fate of a woman raised by a church leader. With those treats she has meaning, and with dinners and hugs before bed, so do I.
For now, at least, I want to privately work on a book or something else, and just feel useful to Mom. She cares a lot about what I do, and ultimately she is the only one who has to. I hesitate to write this, but I really, really could use a person who wants to see such a book come to pass. I need accountability to get things written, and I would love more deadlines to such a person who is willing to ‘make me accountable’ to doing such. On top of all of this, I already am someone who has operated with ADD his entire life, and I’ve got several thousand unfinished projects already. I don’t want to let this one pass by, but I need help. I can be lame enough to admit it.