I really do think I might be becoming clinically depressed; I’m slowing down and putting on weight.
I am consumed with the injustice that the kind neighbour who put out my mother’s dustbins for her is dead while she is still sitting around in a chair giving out orders and complaining that the tea someone has nicely poured for her is the wrong colour. She looks strong and liable to go on for ever. Her 100 year old sister, who went into hospital with an infection is back out again. The friend who died suddenly, is still in a fridge awaiting a post mortem, though a date for the funeral at a distance, has been set.
More than ever I feel the randomness of life. In the developed world if you are not doing a physically hard and relentless job or filling yourself full of chemical substances, the hour of your demise seems as unpredictable as ever. I would say, in that case, carpe diem and go off and do all sorts of things but while my responsibilities are as they are I can’t even have a holiday. I haven’t had a day off in three years.
This week I spent two entire days phoning the mortgage lenders to arrange the transfer of money to pay the care bill. On Monday it was one half hour wait to speak to someone who couldn’t get through to the right department. So I rang back and had a three quarter hour wait to get someone who said I would be put in the diary and someone would ring me on Friday. So I waited in for the stipulated hour. When they didn’t ring it was another half hour hanging on the phone listening to the repeated message saying they were busy with important things, then someone answered the phone by picking it up and hanging up before I had managed to speak a word. So I rang back and followed the instructions to email them, then somebody rang. promised to ring back and then somebody else rang and actually did the transfer, or, at least, put it in the diary for Tuesday. So that was two whole days of my life listening to a recorded message, in order to borrow and pay interest on my own inheritance in order to care for my mother who spent her whole life using my inheritance to black mail me into doing what ever she wanted. I don’t actually care about the money, money doesn’t bring you happiness, at the moment it’s financing misery all round. I do care about the waste of my time when I have so little of it. The money will run out half way through November, I have emailed the financial adviser to ask her to put the wheels in motion to borrow more, if it is possible. If it isn’t possible…..
In the middle was a nice day. It was our wedding anniversary, though the only person who had remembered was step-mother-in-law who wasn’t even at the wedding. And the OT, who had gone to buy flowers at the supermarket the evening before and, worried that they would die, had begged the bucket of water from the customer service counter and driven slowly to the pub and back again with a bucket of water and some flowers in the car boot. Then I went to life drawing, which was lovely and then we went out and had a lovely meal and the waiter, who was very young, asked how you stayed married for 39 years. I said that you understand that you aren’t perfect either. I think it helps to recognise love when you see it, even if it looks like driving to the pub with a bucket of water in the boot.
Now it isn’t raining, which makes a change this summer, so after I have phoned my mother I’m off into the garden. Over the past three years the garden and the art have kept me going. I am also grateful that the OT has helped with my mother, he has just done the driving but that has been a help.
I know there are people in worse positions, I only have to go to Miniatura to meet plenty of them. This summer three friends have lost their not really old husbands. I am trying to find little silver linings, I am learning to dance in the rain, I think I’m just stumbling in the gutter because I’m so tired.
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JaneLaverick.tired