Today is Declared an Unscheduled Holiday

I took a break from the blog back in November because I knew that if I didn't, the pent-up venom caused from stressing out was going to explode onto the blog.  Seeing that the stress had nothing to do with homeschooling, or homemaking, or creativity, it didn't seem appropriate to allow such an event to occur.  So I went dark.

In addition to my responsibilities of being a wife, mother, homemaker, and educator of my children, I was also caring for my elderly neighbor.  She had had a support system, but the support system had to re-locate due to employment opportunities and I just kind of got assigned with her supervision.  I loved my neighbor and I was happy to care for her, but I also carried a lot of resentment about having the responsibility forced upon me.  It's one thing to step up to caring for your own parents, and it's another to feel backed into a corner and having to care for someone else's parent because...well, honestly, I just really couldn't understand why my neighbor had been left behind.

But you can't just leave a 70 year old woman, who was clearly suffering from some sort of dementia, on her own.  So I stepped up.  Many of us in our neighborhood stepped up, but I was the only one in her close circle who was consistently home during the day, so the daily monitoring fell to me.  At first, it was helping her get back into her house a couple times a week when she'd lock herself out.  Then it progressed into helping her find her keys so she could leave her house.  There were a few instances of having to clean up bloodied knees and elbows after she'd trip on her front step.  My kids and I started carrying in her groceries because it tired her out to walk up the stairs.

Things started getting worse, really fast, this last autumn.  People in the neighborhood started coming up to me and asking what was wrong with our neighbor because she wasn't acting like herself anymore.  At first it was one person asking, then three, then a whole lot of people.  I phoned her son, but he dismissed my concerns and reassured me that the behavior was normal for her, and I relayed the information to all the concerned parties.

She started having dizzy spells, so I started monitoring her medication and checking in on her multiple times each day.  She seemed to be a different version of herself, living through a different day of the week, each time I'd walk into her house.  She would tell me about people appearing in her home and car rides she had taken with her son earlier in the day, which made no sense because the window in our school room faces her living room and I could see her, sitting on her couch and crocheting, all morning long.

I started to worry full-time.  I took her with me just about anywhere that I went, whether it was church functions or Knit Nite or grocery shopping.  Her son kept telling me her behavior seemed very normal for her.  I reached the point of utter rage over the situation and just started spewing my frustration to anyone who would listen.  The unanimous response:  This was not something I should be dealing with, and her family needed to arrange for her care.

It took me another two weeks to gather up the courage to ask Michael to make the call.  (Personal bravery fail; but whatever, it got the job done.)  I felt horrendously guilty for "bailing" on my dear friend, but I couldn't handle it all anymore and I was terrified that I was going to walk in on her lifeless body laying in her bed from a medication overdose.  Michael phoned the son and, bless my husband forever, had a bit of a "Come to Jesus" conversation that included an unspoken ultimatum that our neighbor was going to be cared for within a week or that a phone call would be made to Social Services on her behalf.

She was on plane to her family in two days.  She didn't know that she was going away to stay (the official story was that her son found a last-minute deal and that she was going to visit for Thanksgiving), and she seemed rather confused when the bishop and his wife, her home teacher and his wife, and I showed up to say good bye before she was taken to the airport.

That was a few days before Thanksgiving.  We haven't heard anything since, despite multiple phone calls and voicemail messages.

Two days ago we had a dramatic temperature drop and Michael decided to go check on our neighbor's house that morning to make sure the pipes were OK.  He came back quickly and told me "It's bad."  The electricty and gas had been shut off sometime during the week before (while I was battling the flu and had forgotten to keep an eye on her porch light--my signal that the electricity had not been shut off) and now there were actual icicles hanging out of the faucets all through the house.  We needed to get a hold of the son, NOW.  So we left various messages, each stating that we desperately needed to talk to him immediately.

He phoned back late in the afternoon.  We talked pipes for about ten minutes, and then he said "Well, I should probably let you know that she passed away last week."

It turns out that my neighbor's "dementia" was actually brain cancer.  Brain cancer that had also mestastasized to her liver.  She didn't survive the surgery.




"Scaring" her when the girls
dressed up as Celts.
(2011)

So I'm in a weird place right now.  She wasn't my mother or my grandmother (she was one week younger than my maternal grandother, so that's a more fitting category).  But she was the person who slept over at my house and watched my kids when I went to the hospital to have my babies.  She smoothed my hair and let me cry on her shoulder during my dark, dark, post-partum months (36 of them!), and then she would come over Friday evenings to babysit and kick Michael and I out of the house because she insisted that we "needed to go on dates."
I feel like I have lost a mother...of sorts.  It was hard to watch her fade away right before me, it was hard to send her away without letting her know what was going on, and now it's hard knowing that she is permanently gone and that I won't go visit her next summer.  She's just gone.

And I know, intellectually, that she's just in another place and that she's happier there.  And that knowledge has gotten me through the last two days as I knocked on doors to inform her friends in the neighborhood, face-to-face, of her passing.  But last night I just ran out of energy to be there for people anymore.  I've been telling myself that she wasn't family and that she's been gone for almost two months anyway and that it wouldn't bother me.  But truthfully, it does.

Sitting with Junebug at Bluebird's first soccer game.  (2009)

I miss her.  I miss just seeing her sitting on the couch in her living room.  I miss knocking on her door and telling her good news and her raising her fists in air and celebrating with me.  I miss laughing with her at Knit Nite.  I miss lecturing her about being safe and eating healthy and how she should let me take her to the doctor.  I miss helping her find her stuff, frustrating as it was.  I miss seeing her in the hallways at church and I miss seeing her set out in the morning for her daily walk.  I just miss her.

So, yeah, today is declared an unscheduled holiday, even though we weren't related and she's technically been gone for almost two months anyway.  I am going to mourn my friend/surrogate-mother-for-the-past-seven-years.

I'll probably mourn tomorrow.  And the day after that.  It will all be OK.  (Oh, bonus, no school next Monday anyway because of MLK Jr. Day.)

Bluebird & Penguin knocking on her door to show off their new science goggles and gloves.  (2009)

I am so thankful to have known her and that she was placed in my life to help me through some of the hardest things I've gone through so far in my young life.  I am thankful that we will meet again in the next life and I am thankful that she has been re-united with the babies that she wasn't allowed to mother in this life.  I wish I had weathered the stress of caring for her with more grace and more patience and hadn't complained about it.  I wish I had risen up and unflinchingly taken on the title of "Complete *itch" and insisted that she go to the doctor for more than just her prescription refills, especially after I thought she just "looked" unwell.  But then I remind myself of where she is now, and that she did get to spend her last holiday season with her children because Michael and I stood up and advocated for her, and I feel better about it.

I've learned a lot from all of this, and I certainly hope that I don't have to use my newfound knowledge EVER, but it is there and I will be able to do so much more if I'm presented with a situation like this again.  (Which actually seems likely because I'm the firstborn in my family and my parents just started their 50's.)  My gut was right all along and I let other people talk me out of what I thought I should be doing until it was too late.  (But then I remind myself of where she is now, and that she did get to spend her last holiday season with her children because Michael and I...)

I miss you, my dear friend, and I'll be looking for your face when my time comes (hopefully, not for many, many years) to travel to where you are now.  You were an incredible blessing in my life.