WAGblog

Brief update (Edited 3/25)

(Have tried to edit this many times but the paragraphs will not register...do not know why...Sorry. I did put them in but for some reason they are not "taking"!) I have been visiting Cy and watching out for him, though his family has also been around (they are gradually leaving this past week, and the last one, the eldest daughter, will be gone as of tomorrow, except for Leila and her partner, who will be in and out and about town for 2 more weeks). The younger daughter lives nearby and will be "on call," I imagine, doing her usual cooking on Cy's behalf at the very least. But how Cy will cope on his own is anyone's guess. He has seemed reluctant these past number of months, even to leave the house to do the shopping he was able to do...Now that he will be alone, how will he accomplish those things he must do? And will he ask for help if he cannot get them done? I can do what I can do, and certainly will do anything at all that I can...if he simply lets me know what he needs. It's tricky because Cy is so proud and so determined to be independent that I doubt I could simply say, Let me do such and such...But you never know. I have offered to do certain things for him and he has indeed taken me up on the offer before. Unfortunately, either the errand has proven fruitless, or it has required my driving after dark or too far for comfort, and so I have not successfully accomplished what he has wanted -- far too often for my comfort and his pleasure...Though naturally he would not say so. For me, it still has not sunk in that Lynn is dead. Partly because I still see Cy so regularly that it is hard to believe that Lynn is not in the next room, though Cy's grief is palpable enough. In any event, I do not feel anything...no grief, no loss, no nothing...Just numbness and emptiness, emptiness of feeling that is, not of missing a friend. I wish it weren't so, but that is how it is... As for Joe, he seems to have decided that it is fine with him -- the ungrateful a-hole -- that I cannot get there anymore. It's either I pay $50/week to get a ride there and back or I can't see him...and despite his having a huge trust fund, he has decided not to ask his mother, the trustee, to pay for the rides, though he knows I cannot afford it myself ( I already have enormous medical bills of my own). He would rather feud with his mother, after 50 years of putting up with her. He wants to have it out with her, in her 89th year, she suffering with breast cancer, he dying of ALS -- you'd think he'd want reconciliation and peace with her, but no, he wants WAR, he wants to upset her and cause her pain. He has actually said as much...I am so disappointed in him I cannot speak. He wants to be cruel to her, because as he says, it makes him feel stronger than she is for the first time in his life! But what a way to do so...And she is so bewildered, because she doesn't understand why he is behaving as he does, and he won't explain himself. No he is too passive to explain what he does or why he does it; he is just passively aggressive enough to play hostile games with her and be overtly cruel without explanation. Oh, cripes, I cannot explain it all, and I know a lot of it is his misunderstanding and lack of empathy due to Aspergers...He cannot get into her shoes and see where she is coming from, or try to undestand her point of view. He is still ONLY that 5 year old little boy he once was, with the big mother with the booming voice that used to scare him...and he cannot get past that, no matter how much I or anyone else tries to urge him to see that he is no longer a child. But that is the problem, he is not that child, and she is not that mother, not any longer. She knows this and has moved on. But he does not, and does not realize that people grow up and change and learn from life...Now, Betty, his mother, may not have learned much, having been an incompetent mother pretty much from start to finish, but she does love her son, and he cannot see that, will not even entertain the notion. Not that this maternal feeling does much to make her loveable. She is still the most inept and self-centered mother I have ever met. But she does do the things that a loving mother must do: come in from out of town when her child is in the ICU and stay all night and all day, as she did (much to Joe's dismay and consternation). Visit him in the chronic ward of the hospital, regularly, until he threw her out for reasons completely unknown to her...She does do what a mother should do, even if -- when she visits-- she behaves completely self-absorbedly and even somewhat "crack-brained," as if she is not all there (as I suspect she never has been). Anyhow, the upshot of this is that Joe can see only that she was an inadequate "abusive" mother, and he blames her for it, accuses her of doing everything to him on purpose, as if she could have chosen to be a better mother and did not do so deliberately...In response to this belief, he treats her coldly and accuses her regularly of abuse, which is the reason he wants to cut her off: she is abusive if she stares at him, if she touches his arm, if she leans over him, if she...anything at all, practically. Yet we -- Karen or I -- could do any of these things, and none of it would be called abusive. So it is not the objective act, but the person performing it that is "abusive." And why? Because he fundamentally can't stand her, and so hates any contact with her, casual or otherwise. That being the case, he is aching for a fight, and has decided that the trade-off, ---putting up with his mother, in exchange for being able to see me --is not worth it, and so has opted NOT to see his mother, or talk with her about getting me rides in, and hence NOT to see me either. That is his choice, and it is an actively passive one, if you can see what i mean. He thinks I will find the money somehow and thinks he can force me to pay for my own rides somehow, that I would never not keep coming. But I do not have the money, one, and I will NOT ask anyone in my family to pay any more than they already do for my assistance! It simply is not fair, and Joe truly does owe me after so many months of my shouldering the costs of visiting...Let him swinng in the wind, then, and see how long he wants to hold out. Karen can get there; she drives, and will do so, because she won't stay away, has no life otherwise. But I can stay away and keep very busy, having Cy and a thousand other things to do. I will miss seeing Joe tremendously, but if he thinks that I will pine away from losing my days with him, he is sorely miostaken, I will only have more time for my own things, and will get much more done than I have time for now. Maybe I will be able to start the next big sculpture project then, or finish making my bedroom into my studio, or both! ----------------- Later: I had a screaming fit with the visiting nurse and later, partly on paper and partly by phone with Dr O a day ago...They accused me of being "more paranoid than usual" and wanted me to take 2.5mg Zyprexa in addition to the 2.5mg I already take. They insisted it was in fact my regularl,y scheduled dose. But neither of them remembered that I agreed ONLY to take ONE 3.5mg dose all along, that the other 2.5mg was PRN, that the pharmacy insisted that both doses be written as regularly scheduled, because they couldn't hand out a Rx for PRN drugs...But in fact the second 2.5mg was PRN only...I was furious when they kept insisting that I'd been refusing the second 2.5mg, when I hadn't refused anything; it was NOT prescribed! It so enraged me that they would not listen or even try to remember what I know was the truth, because I know I'd never have agreed to take 5mg on a regular basis...knowing how it would make me gain weight even more than the damage done by 2.5 mg, which was quite enough thank you. So that caused one screaming fit and then a second one...and upset me for hours. Then, there is the infernal Eclipse I witnessed that has had no reasonable explanation given me by anyone yet...I do not know what or why I saw what I saw, I only know that it was apparently real and not even a dream that happened while I was awake ( a strange enough experience of its own, in its own right. After taking the last Ritalin and coffee, I found myself still so tired and sleepy tyhat I gave up on the ms and came to bed, where I find myself typing away, sleepy and double-visioned, but enjoying writing as usual. I wrote three poems in three days...I have been reluctant to put my poems on the interent, due to a number of website writing contests that forbid it if you want to enter. Whatever I wrote -- I am editing this three days later afterwards because the website went down before I could do so last time -- in the last paragraph, I have no idea what it meant! If you read it and scratched your heads, well, so did I... I think I had taken my Xyrem and continued to write, such that I was half in dreamland and still writing, and not making the slightest bit of sense, because I truly was half asleep. Forgive me. Half my journal entries end in such nonsense, I fear and the ones that don't suffer from terrible repetition as the Abilify gets me to write write write but with no memory or discriminationi to protect me from writing the same things over and over and over... Posted by pamwagg at March 22, 2008 11:02 PM | TrackBack