More to catch up on.
Last weekend I was with my Mother and Stepfather. My sister Ruth and my brother-in-law Rich were there too, Mom has Alzheimer’s (early or middle stage) along with type II diabetes, and deterioration of the spine; maybe more too. She is better recently due to a new antidepressant, I think. I won’t belabor the whole gruesome tale just to say one thing that affected me.
Mom doesn’t do well managing her diet for the diabetes; in fact, she ignores it completely except to test her blood sugar and complain that the level (any level) is why she is feeling bad at that moment. Anyway, on Sunday morning we were all up and we needed to leave around 10:00 AM me to catch my plane and Ruth to drive home to Seattle. Around eight o’clock we smelled cinnamon rolls cooking in the kitchen! Soon Mom measured her blood sugar and announced that is was 159. (That is high) and that it had been high for several days. I thought this was perhaps an opportunity to get her attention on the diet, so I said; “Mom, if your blood sugar is so high maybe you reconsider eating a cinnamon roll!” She just blew it off. I was furious I went to front porch to get away before I told her off. Ruth saw my anger and told me that if just made her see the futility of it all. What she said was true and right, but I was still furious and just couldn’t shake my anger.
I had 90 minutes while I drove the airport and during that time I figured out why I was so angry about something that I couldn’t control. It was because when Jo Lynn was sick she did everything she could, no matter how hard, how difficult in the hope that the treatments would work. They did of course allow her to live for nearly four years after her first cancer was diagnosed. But the treatments, the surgeries, the difficult life she had would have discouraged most people but she accepted it all. She was just so glad to be alive and even when the leukemia flared to prevent the stem cell transplant she knew the odds were very slim but she trusted God and the doctors. She undertook the treatments and they were terrible but she kept going because she wanted so much to live. If she had thought any other treatment would have been helpful she would have mustered the strength to do it. Her will to live was so strong and her faith was so strong that she was strong enough for what ever the treatment required.
Now I was face with a cranky old woman who won’t even stop eating sugar when she knows it will kill her and makes caring for her even harder for my step Dad, I was angry because it was just not fair, not to anyone. But I am helpless to change my Mother and I was helpless to do anymore for my wife. It all made me angry and it took several days for me to calm down. I am still angry but I have accepted it now and it doesn’t make me crazy anymore. The unfairness of it is still the same, and I don’t like it at all.
