15
Jan, 2020

An emotional time (but I’ll get over it)

Me & Dad at his care home
Dad has been gone for some time now and, despite that we didn’t really get along I am missing him. 
Christmas was difficult as was New Year, both as he had been here the year before and the year before that and we had a good time.
Wednesday 15th is the day his flat is sold. It is the last tangible link to him. He never actually lived there, though that was the intention. His dementia suddenly got very bad and unmanageable at home just weeks before the completion of the sale so we instead got tenants in and used the rental income to part pay the care home fees.
It was a very nice care home, Dad wasn’t happy there but then, Dad wouldn’t have been happy anywhere, that was Dad. 
My feelings right now and all over the place and I have been feeling quite down, it’s like the final goodbye.
I don’t know if you feel like this but somehow I feel different now that both my parents have gone. Sure, part of it is my feeling that it’s my turn next, that generational position in the family, I could do without that but mainly it is that my connection with a huge chunk of my past that perhaps even I don’t remember properly has gone. Not that Dad, bless him, could have been much help on that front over the last years, he barely knew who anyone was. I think he knew he could trust me at the end (last July) but not really sure who he thought I was yet … there were some days when he proudly introduced me as his son … another sign that the dementia was in control as this is something he would never have done when he was healthy!

Dad’s little memoriam area at our place

His mind managed to resurrect many long since dead relatives, I went along with him mostly except when it was obvious he knew that something wasn’t right. It really isn’t fair to remind someone that a person they cared about has gone. Pleasantly he had forgotten that my mum had gone and often used to ask how she was and if I could ask her to visit at some point. He said he thought that somehow he had upset her but couldn’t remember what he had done. That’s really quite sad.

I am confident we made the right choice not to have a traditional funeral. The family is so fractured with so many strong views that we didn’t feel the need to go through that. Both Essex and Northampton did there own thing locally for what felt right for us. Thankfully me and my sister were and are in agreement on how things were handled. We had been through a complicated enough funeral when our mum died with two funeral receptions arranged by different factions of the family. This time we had to get it right as we were not going to get another try at it.
For both of us I feel that the sale of the flat was the final closure for us. It is 6 months after he passed but selling was a little trying!

I am very glad he got to meet Dennis a few times in his final years and they got along, that made me really happy. Of course, everyone gets along with Dennis!
End of an era and I guess 87 isn’t too bad … had he only not left mentally many years earlier.

First Post of 2020

This is a really insignificant post if I am totally honest .. and I generally am.

I didn’t set any new year resolutions, not really my thing and mainly because I know life has a way of happening differently.

Updates as to where I am in 2020. I am now parentless, it happens. I was very lucky to have at least one parent survive into my 50’s and still so ever so sad that my mum never got to know the real me at all. That finality happened last year so this is the first year of me being at that next level, in other words, the next generation expected to die! Let’s get real, it’s the way life is and we wouldn’t want it anyway, parents should die before their children, they just should.

My health condition has continued to get worse, no connection to the previous paragraph this, just how things are and I don’t expect it to kill me, just make life more difficult than I would like. Certainly it is fair to say that I need to make some changes but with my limited choices, I don’t much like those changes! Trying to get that balance between my longevity and my enjoyment of life is a challenge.

I’ve got to make some positive steps for my future over the next few months. I cannot keep being a victim of the State system, I have to find a way to make it work for me and that’s nowhere near as easy to do as it is when I am fighting for others. So far I am in the situation where for each two steps forward I am a step back again for one reason or another. It is very frustrating. I can say that I feel my country is not the country I grew up in. Back in the day we used to complain if we had to wait an hour for our GP to see us, now we have to accept that we may not get an appointment at all or we must wait several weeks for a telephone consultation. Same with the police. 999 doesn’t work any more, there is very little real protection. Even if we can get the police to take interest we are expected to get the evidence ourselves if we want them to proceed, it’s all about cutting costs. Social Services just insisted on my Zoey doing a voluntary job (don’t worry, we’ll overturn that one). There is no benefit to her doing this, she doesn’t want to and it wouldn’t work for her. She’s actually at a very delicate moment having just come off all her meds and the only logical reason to suggest it is so that social services can cut her care budget. If she goes and does ‘work’ then she doesn’t need a carer, saves them money, screws up Zoey but, the money part is the priority they have to work by.

I can categorically say I am not suffering from depression and mainly not anxiety either. That said, when my body just stops functioning when I am out and about, that’s quite an anxious moment. It happens all too frequently as well.

My body clock is screwed, it’s 04:17 right now and I don’t feel very sleepy at all. Annoyingly, even if I force myself to stay away all of tomorrow to compensate it won’t make any difference! It’ll still be me into the wee small hours trying to sleep!

Ironically, this was meant to come across as positive because I still feel positive about life yet, somehow it reads really negative. Perhaps I just do my most positive thinking in negative situations? 🙂