Dead Letter Department #143

weather report

God, this cold is lingering. It’s certainly not as bad as it was, but I am still hauling handkerchiefs everywhere I go & having to take much longer rests than usual. I keep feeling like it wouldn’t be as bad if I were sleeping normally, or even that heavy brick-to-the-head sleep of being ill, but I’m going through a mini insomnia period: not a terrible one, but certainly not helping the old bod try to recover. Last night I felt like I tossed around forever and then suddenly the birds were letting me know they made it through the night & I just lay there for a while, vaguely remembering a dream about taking my parents down south somewhere to get tattoos. Matching, maybe? It’s strange how often I dream of them together when they were divorced for 15 years before my dad died, after which they were literally never in the same room together, unless it was running into each other at the co-op or someplace else public.

I got the basics done this weekend, all my errands & my mom’s, a good solid house clean & reset to get rid of some of the chaos from last week, a big pot of tortellini & sausage & veggies cooked up last night to make dinners easy for a couple of days. I had a couple of very sad looking apples in the fridge, ready to be replaced by the good new crop that’s in the stores now, so I baked them, thinking that would be a way to pleasantly use them up instead of feeling wasteful, but they turned out quite mid, even with brown sugar whipped cream.

I’ve been thinking more about food with all of the MFK Fisher reading, both her books and her letters, the way she writes with such precision and pleasure about cooking and eating (her biography, which I have yet to read, is titled Poet of the Appetites). The necessary dietary changes of the past few years eliminated a lot of the enjoyment I used to take in cooking, paring things down to a much more practical level. I used to buy myself a new cookbook nearly every year for my birthday, experiment with baking and spices and things from specialty grocery stores, but somehow it all sounds like more work than it’s worth these days. Perhaps I’ll find my way back to it at some point.

It occurs to me as I write this that it is hard to overestimate the amount of energy it has taken this last year to step into a caretaker role for my mom more fully. Things are so much better than they were that it almost seems like complaining to talk about it at all. I have to occasionally stop and catch my breath, remind myself that earlier this spring there was a whole string of weeks where it seemed entirely possible that she would not come home from the skilled nursing facility at all, because she could not turn over in bed unassisted, or tend to her own bathroom/hygiene needs, which would have meant going directly into nursing care.

Now she is back to doing many of her own household chores on her own, slowly taking over the things I was doing for her at first. At the moment she simply does not have the upper body strength to heave her walker up and down the stairs, which means she literally can’t go out on her own, even for a stroll down the block, so every time she’s left the house since she came home in the spring has been with me. (We did have the could you get out in case of a real emergency conversation, which she assures me she could, even if she couldn’t get far.) Next week we’re having ramps built in the front and the back of the house, which should increase her independence quite a bit, especially if she can learn how to use the bus stop that is only two blocks from the house.

I’m hoping it will just feel better for her to be able to get to the library or the senior center or even just the grocery store down the street on her own schedule whenever she wants to go out, instead of having to wait for me to be available. Regardless, we’ve extended the time she can continue to stay at home, which is her very strong desire for this part of her life.

I’m afraid I’ve become a bit of a pest on this subject in the rest of my life, asking everyone my age if they’re having conversations about aging and care with their parents, talking to older friends who have already been through it about what their experiences were, what they would have done differently. I think there is a general refusal to grapple with this entire stage, if we’re lucky enough to reach it, myself very much included, since I will almost certainly not have many of the things that make a comfortable old age more likely. I also can’t really engage with that while I’m so fully wrapped up in someone else’s caretaking, even though I know it only seems far off and improbable until one day you’re falling over it yourself.

All of this to say that it is a simple fact that this caretaking, both physical and mental, all of the cheerful problem-solving and gentle encouragement and rather less gentle insistence when required, must come from somewhere in order to be used, and I am increasingly feeling like I have depleted all the reservoirs over the course of the last year in order to make it happen. I dream of ways to start filling them again, but have not managed any of them quite yet. Everything takes money or time, usually both. I think it’s one of the reasons the change of season is feeling particularly hard this year—the warm, bright days when I would usually be a little more adventurous, visiting friends, being outside—didn’t have much room for that, and now I’m looking at pumpkin displays in the grocery store while the sun starts to disappear, making room for the Big Dark, without having had the experiences that would sustain me through it.

More soon, and in the meantime, may your own oncoming onset of the Big Dark be accompanied by whatever most sustains you in the season.