Consistently Blah

Over the past several weeks I’ve gotten into a real grove with The Blahs.  Embracing them. Blahs are underrated.  Blahs give you consistency and stability, a nice stable core of apathy underneath your mood that you won’t sink below.

The blahs helped me to do nothing at work yesterday and not really give a shit about it.  I instead focused on physical therapy, slogged through various exercises with bands around first my ankles and then my thighs, lateral movements and leg raise movements and clam shell movements that I have always felt are meant for women only but apparently are also good for core stability for just about anyone who cares to do them.

Then, later, they helped me to listen to my wife complain about how hard her life is.  She did this for two hours straight.  If I wasn’t so blah, I might have gotten irritated.  If I had more important things to do, maybe I would have cut her off and gone and done other things instead of laying next to her on the couch listening to her say the same things over and over.  But when you feel like I do, you don’t care.  I have nothing better to do.

So she talked about her parents and she repeated things I’ve heard a lot already, treating me like her personal always-on therapist.

Why do they both have to be sick?  none of my friends’ parents have Alzheimers.  My mom didn’t know me last Friday.

 

I talked to her on the phone today and she stopped at one point and said who are you and I had to repeat that I’m her daughter Jennie and finally she said ok Jennie I know you.  So she still doesn’t know me all the time.  

It may still get a little better, she’s only been on the antibiotics for the UTI for a couple of days.

I feel like I don’t have a mother anymore, my mother is gone.

Jennie repeats this a few times, complains about her Dad next, who is 95 and well, who knows how long he’ll go, not much longer — and then back to her mom.  Repeats the above almost verbatim.  I suggest she’s ruminating, poring over the same thing over and over and she becomes irritated with me.

I have to talk about this with someone!  You’re my husband!

I’m aware.  But I’m suggesting that repeating the same thing over and over isn’t good for you.  I’m concerned that this is what’s in your mind all the time.  So now you’re miserable talking to them — and visiting them — and then you extend your misery into your personal time — and our personal time — by talking about it not just once — but then repeating it over and over again. The same things.  

I do not always talk about the same things!

Yes you do.  Next you’ll talk about how you can’t believe both of them are declining at once, that most people have at least one parent who is OK so it’s only one at at time that’s declining.  But not you, poor you, woe is you, both are going simultaneously. Then you’ll say that if your mom can’t recognize you, you would wish her to be dead instead, because what’s the point of having your mom alive if she can’t recognize you?  And then you’ll say these thoughts make you feel guilty and I will assure you that they’re perfectly normal and don’t make you a bad person.

Yeah okay, I will say all of those things.  But I have to get it out!  I can’t just keep it bottled up!  I can’t just accept what’s happening.

Yet you must.  

There must be something I can do.  I always feel like I failed them.

You didn’t fail them, you worked as hard as you could to take care of them.  You even tried to get your mom into a trial drug study for Alzzies and they rejected her.  

I could have done a better job with that.

No, you couldn’t have, we’ve been over that too.  They initially accepted her and then they rejected her because they had a study limit and that was that.  And even if she DID get into the trial and it was SORT of effective it just would have slowed the decline by perhaps 20%.  What’s 20%?  a couple of months out of a year.  It wouldn’t have saved her.  Nothing will save her.

I’m just having such a hard time accepting it.

I’m so sorry Jennie.  It’ll take time.  You’re transitioning.  Things are changing and they suck.  These days are going to continue though.  Over and over and over, the days where you see them continue to decline.  

There must be something I can do!

You said that already.  There isn’t.  In the War against Alzheimers, the world is batting 0 for Infinity.  Nobody beats it, there is no cure.  I don’t understand why your brain pretends you have a chance in this fight.  Probably a struggle for control — you want to believe you are in control of this thing.  But you aren’t.  The reality is that we’re in this state where we will just continue to muddle along and watch them get worse.

I know, I think that’s what I hate the most.  I can’t see any endpoint.

—

We talked about this — variations on the above theme — for nearly two hours.  I asked what her therapist might say if she went into this level of detail about how much she thinks about her parents and their decline and she said that she wasn’t sure but “I’m her husband and she needs to talk to me about this” which made me feel uncomfortable, as though she’s claiming that I need to be available to support her emotionally for hours a day.

As if I don’t have my own problems, want my own downtime from listening to this.

Luckily for her, I have nothing better to do.