Moving TB The Elder And Mom, One Year On

 One of the great things about having a public blog is it functions as a sort of public journal; recall for particular points in time and space are much easier to find than having to dig through endless journal pages to find the desired entry.  In that, at least, technology has benefitted us - if we want to find an emotion, it is that much easier to locate.

This day last year, we had already moved my mother and were getting ready to move my father.  How time flies, indeed (for those that may be newer, the whole story is here:  Moving TB The Elder And Mom).

It is hard for me to believe it has been a year since I was able to talk to TB The Elder in a coherent conversation.  Before that, I talked to him and my mom once a week (every Tuesday).

Events like this happen, of course:  the sort of thing that is not just a turn in the road, but a direct 90 degree turn followed by a downhill plunge.  You think that life is simply going to slow down at these critical junctures but of course it does not; life has a way of continuing to move on and, if anything, feel like it is picking up speed in the process.

I am out again at The Ranch this week; we are fortunate in that the weather is sufficiently nice that outside visits are allowed and we can go and see them (tomorrow as I am writing this, today as you are reading it).  The house is silent now as it always is when I am here now:  the clocks on the wall tick out a steady beat as the frogs outside chant into the darkness to the stars.

We are, so far as we know, no closer to a better resolution yet infinitely closer to the resolution that will come.  My sister let me know that my father needs more care now at night due to his insomnia; at the visit in December, the facility owner let us know my mom requires more prompting in eating and is having episodes of "doing her business" where she happens to be (a sweatpants suit that zips up in back helps prevent this).   There are no illusions about how this ends, just a quiet sense of dread in that we do not know how long and what things will look like before we get there.

My fear - I say fear, but it is nothing that I am afraid of, just something that I acknowledge will occur - is that we will reach the point where we will be just faces that they think they recognize, but they do not know who we are.  Given long enough, that day will come - the life expectancy for a post-Alzheimer's diagnosis (in case you were wondering) is 10-12 years; we are current 7 years into my mother's diagnosis.  But of course that is dependent on a lot factors - it could be shorter, it could be much longer.

It is, I am sure, not an inconvenience for my parents in that I suspect they do not realize that things have never been except as they are now.  I cannot know what it is like to experience such things - I can only guess, of course - but my guess is simply that life is in the now.  Always in the now.  Perhaps like what we associate life with our pets like:  there may be some memory, but largely it is a current experiential stream of consciousness, lived moment by moment in the here and now.

The refrigerator cracks on with a hum.

It has been a year since a television sounded in this house, since a phone rang, since my father sat out on the porch or my mother sat here at the couch reading her book - the very place I am typing this missive now.  The house looks largely the same as it ever did and to almost anyone that had been here before, they would see little to suggest that things had changed at all.  A little more dust, perhaps - I am terrible about dusting at home, let alone here - but other than that, few differences.

The difference to me is that I cannot now speak to my mother and father, not in a way that it used to be.  There are sealed away behind a barrier that, having gone through, I cannot scale or pass.  I can only look in from the outside and communicate, as much as by shape and shadows as by voice.

Even the walls here say "We knew them once, but they are gone.  Where they are now, we cannot fully say".