More Alzzy’s

My wife’s mom is in the hospital again.  Deep cough, yellow color to her skin.

Jennie had to take her today.  She went to visit during her lunch hour because the library where she works is only three minutes away from their house, so she checks in on them every day and does basic care.  Have they taken their pills.  Have they eaten something.   When she arrived her mom was coughing like crazy, deep coughs, so Jennie took her to the ER.

They’re there right now and I can’t go because of covid protocols.  One guest only in the labs.  There’s no point to me going, I would just sit in the parking lot or waiting room outside.

I don’t know what to do with myself.  I am waiting at home.  I can’t do anything helpful.  But I am too geared up to do anything that anyone might consider to be fun.  Can’t watch television, can’t play a video game or practice guitar.

Here is the reality of having people that you love in your life:  When they are not well, you are not well.  You cannot relax unless they are relaxed.

Jennie texts me things like “My mom would not want to live this way.  She is in the hospital but doesn’t know why, sometimes she knows who I am and sometimes she doesn’t.  She looks yellow.  Joe I’m scared.”

I ask if she wants me to go and just sit in the parking lot.  “No.  We wouldn’t even be able to drive home together, we’d have separate cars.”

I ask if she’s contacted her brother.  Yes.  Her brother yelled at her for calling him, said “I’m in surgery and I don’t care about Mom, she wants to die anyway.”

This sucks.  It is a state of limbo that grows increasingly more common as I get older:  Waiting for something else to end so that I can try to relax.

But nothing ever ends, and so I never seem to relax.  Other people suffer interminably and we must care for them and therefore we are in a continual state of discomfort.

Sometimes I wish I could be a shithead.  My shithead brother Mike for example would play World of Warcraft even if his own mother was dying in the next room.  Bad people would just go get drunk and then later, when confronted on their lack of availability, would excuse themselves.  It’s not like I wanted to get drunk, you know me baby, I just can’t handle being around sick people because then I feel sick too because I’m so empathetic.  Drinking is just how I handle the stress.  I chug Jagermeister because I care too much to be present.  That’s what they’d say.  And most of the time the people around them excuse them.

I tried for a few years to be a shithead.  In my early twenties I left the East Coast, drove all the way across the country to San Francisco down highway 80, got a job at a tech company, programmed, drank a lot, tried to go to raves (didn’t enjoy them or the people really), tried to be cool, tried to be popular, tried to be self centered, tried to ignore my family.

It didn’t work.  The pull of them was too intense.  A broken part of me missed the dysfunction and guilt.  I came home to Massachusetts.  I cared for my Mom when she needed it, helped her with knee replacement surgery, cleaned her kitchen and bathroom when she needed it, had dinner with her a few times a month.  I got back together with my old girlfriend from college even though she didn’t treat me very well, often made me feel unloved.  Tried to help my brother get a job in my field — was eventually successful, but then he got himself fired because he stopped showing up.  Tried again and again with him.  Tried to be good to my Dad who wants me to be around all the time.  My Dad was such a shit during my childhood that my brother doesn’t talk to him anymore — EVER — and won’t even accept money from him even though he (my brother) is dead assed broke.

I tried to connect with people, really plug in, help them, be present.

This is where it gets me.  I support other peoples’ lives and they don’t support me.  Or they pretend that I don’t need support because I am a man and middle aged reasonably successful men like me don’t need support, we are supposedly islands, rocks, satellites floating through space, utterly self-sufficient and fine at all times.  People pretend that I don’t need anything for myself.

I wonder why my friend Ryan is really good at guitar and I am not.

It’s because he puts himself first.  No kids.  Wife.  Not much extended family.  When he has free time he says “What would I like to do?” and then he does it.  He does not say to himself “Well is my wife OK?  What can I do for her?  Should I clean the apartment so it’s nice when she gets home?  She’d really like it if I took care of the grocery shopping so that she doesn’t have to do it herself later.”  No.  He says “I am going to learn Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhodes” and then he spends the next two hours practicing.

I don’t know what I need anyway.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe I’ve been needed by so many people for so long that I can’t do much for myself, there’s nothing left, no real hobbies or interests.  They have been replaced by work, by caring, by doing things for other people, by home maintenance and doctors appointments.

One of my fears about this new flare up — whatever is wrong with my wife’s Mom today I mean by “flare up” — is that it will ruin our weekend out of state.  We’ll instead be here, caring for her.  I’ll lose the money I spent on the hotel… eight fucking hundred dollars.

Instead we’ll be at hospitals, at the parents’ house, shopping for them, checking in.

In limbo.