dementia

i'm not sure if i told you. my mother & her sisters went in search of their half sister who has been missing for probably over 20 years. She just got up and left one day.

As a child i was hurt. she meant a lot to me and she never said goodbye and i didn't get it. as an adult, the more i learned about our family, the more i accepted her decision and realized i was just a casualty.

so now they find her in a state run nursing home suffering form dementia and i am expected to use what little vacation time i have to spend traveling there to see her with mom and the aunts in tow. nope. sorry. not going to be able to do it. that's like opening up the phone book of a state hours away to a random page and randomly choosing some person off of that page for me to go visit.

but my family doesn't get it so of course they think i am being cruel or vengeful or hateful. but what they are seeing for the 1st time is just how little emotional attachment i really have to them and what a good acting job i ahve been doing over the years.

and it has to suck. my other aunt who was my fav when i was young before her gambling prob, before she ran off to Atlantic city and i didn't hear from her, before she came back and lost my grandmother's house because she didn't pay the taxes right after my grandmother died, the one who used to drag me to her card games and leave me sitting in people's living rooms alone in the dark for hours, the one who gave me the rent money and told me to not give it back to her no matter what and then came out f the game and cjased me around the woman's house until i gave her the money, when she finally popped up and "cleaned up" her life, i really had nothing to say to her. everyone acted like i was the one that was going driving her back to her old life. so to keep my mom from bugging me i agreed to speak to her. she doesn't get that things are not the same nor will they ever.

i was driving her to the train station so that she could meet her other sister to go see dementia aunt and she says i hope that people i know and love will take care of me. i start laughing because i know that means me -- she has no kids, and she has burned that bridge with my other aunt's kids. So she thinks it will entice me to want to care for her by telling me I am her beneficiary.i told her she could just as well leave it to the church.

it's got to suck to know that no one would want to take care of you. the convo went on with discussions of mourning at funerals. she joked about me trying to throw myself into her casket when she died in my grief; i told her if she didn't have her funeral planned and paid for i was having her cremated and wasn't bothering to pick up her ashes. she tries to threaten me with the knowledge that it would one day be me. I told her i wasn't dumb enough to allow myself to get that broke and that infirm.

i will end up taking care of her and my mom. it's how my grandmother raised me.