. Unless I get a call from Masonicare about something bad going on, I'm not going over there tomorrow.
I plan to put on my favorite old sweatshirt and run my mower over all the fallen leaves and mulch them. I may try to make one of my favorite recipes, sweet potato chunks with black beans and a cilantro/olive oil dressing.
I surrender to whatever happens with mom. I can't arm wrestle God and expect to have my way. I'm just spent. I've done what I can do, and now it's up to her. This may be the way it has to be. Acceptance comes hard to someone who's used to strong-arming her way through life through force of will and determination.
There's no use putting the proceeds from her condo sale into an Ally online money market account. What's the point in complicating my life now or at tax time? $100,000 will earn $1,000 in interest at 1%, so I have a little more than that in the account. But when you're talking such big monthly expenses, for the aide and the assisted living place, $1,000 is a meaningless number.
What I really need to do is find time for the next dreaded task....prepaying for funeral costs. I plan to go with cremation because I believe it is a greener alternative than burial with toxic embalming fluids in the ground. I know I don't want to keep the ashes; it will be too upsetting and a constant reminder. I guess I will have to do what other people do, spread her ashes somewhere that would be beautiful or meaningful to her. She always loved the ocean.
I need to do some comforting things for myself. I can browse Amazon and decide how to spend some $30+ in gift cards. Soon my $500 worth of other gift cards will arrive in the mail.
I will continue to talk to friends who all offer what support they can, in their own way. I find myself talking to complete and total strangers about what I'm going through because I feel I feed on the support I receive. It's the only thing that keeps me going, honestly, aside from my love and compassion for my mom.
This wasn't supposed to be another blog about mom, but as you can see, it is....
And I'll continue my walks in the woods. I'm not a very religious kind of person, but for me, the woods are my church, the tall trees, my steeples.
2015 will be a year that goes down as the Great Depression for me, not in terms of the economy or the state of my finances, but in terms of what's happened with my mother. I'm losing her by degrees, so while I'm spared the shock of a sudden illness or death, I watch her decline, both mentally and physically, each week or month.
My dad took me out to dinner and movie a week ago, calling it our "date." He doesn't often really know what to say when I tell him stuff, but I think he was trying to give me a break from everything going on. My dad, an only child like my mom, must have gone through similar challenges when he had my 89-year-old grandmother move in with him when she had lung cancer. She didn't want chemo treatments, and so she slowly died, hyped up on morphine and painkillers, to the end.
I wonder if we should all plan an Email Nate and Jeff Day so that if we flood them with requests on that one day to fix the photo capabilities on this site, maybe they will finally do something.
Carving out a peaceful Sunday
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