Marge Simpson remarked in one episode that you should be nice to your children because they get to choose your old folk’s home.
Which makes things sound a whole lot easier than they are.
There is no doubt that my mother will have to go into residential accommodation at the beginning of May because the money will have run out. I cannot mortgage the house any further: after another 12 years, which, in someone who has a sister aged 101, is possible, the interest on the loan will exceed the value of the house and I would be left in debt. I’m already out by the amount I would have earned if I’d been able to run my doll business for the last three and a half years, the car is on its last wheels (we had a no start and rescue people out last week) I cannot eat anything without coughing and we have both been ill since January with colds and viruses we can’t seem to shake.
When I cashed in the last savings to pay for care my mother said that would see her out but when I very gently reminded her of the fact when we went on Friday (because we couldn’t go on Wednesday without a car) she went nuts and the next day on the phone was talking complete nonsense in what I am certain is a reaction to the news she has managed to forget totally.
She is far too ill to go round looking at possibilities and I have every confidence would reject them all. So I am going with the one I sent for the application form for in November on the grounds that her friend and her solicitor are directors of it, it is a charity with a policy of keeping eventually destitute long-term residents for free and the rooms have en-suite bathrooms so she would never be stuck waiting for someone to take her to the toilet. At just under a thousand pounds a week it’s quite a bit less than half the current costs, so when I’ve sold the house the money will go a lot further. Moreover I am happy that if something happened to me, her solicitor and friend would still visit her occasionally so she would not be abandoned.
I have to look at the possibility of something happening to me. Other than the journey in an antiquated car I have a hand that stopped working for a few days, an oesophagus like sandpaper, my hip’s seized up in the cold again, which it hasn’t really done for over ten years, in short my auto-immune diseases are taking over, I appear to have no money and not much health left. There is no possibility that the S&H can step in for me, he has a long commute and is now permanently on call at work, finally in a job where they appreciate him and he loves the work and is making, thank goodness, proper money. After all the sofa surfing, people who employed him only to steal his ideas and clients who did him over in his own businesses he seems at last to be on track and there is no way on earth I wish him to give all that up and impoverish his family to care for the grandmother who didn’t speak to him for 7 years and didn’t even send him a card for his 21st birthday because she went off in high dudgeon when I told her she shouldn’t have locked me up and starved me. I didn’t even mention her finishing off my second baby but she took the protest out on him, out of spite. So he is not to give everything up to help her which he would because he’s lived his life helping people.
The OH is just too poorly. Everything is going wrong. He’s been offered a scan, next month. I am hoping, praying, spitting in the wind and so on. So not him, at all.
So it will have to be a home. She will hate it. It will cost a bomb and then kill her.
I am having these terrific headaches, which might stop if I can desist from clenching my teeth.
No the cat can’t go with her. I’ll have to kill her cat.
First I’m going to try calling in the auction house to sell the stuff my father collected. There isn’t a lot, he sold most of it when he had the shop as a retirement business and what there is is unfashionable. What people with money want to collect now is movie costumes and memorabilia and yellow plastic televisions from the 1960s, not faded pieces of peeling Regency furniture which are too big for modern houses. This and anything else not nailed down, if it sells, might buy my mother another month in an empty house.
I feel like Frodo on the rock in the lava stream; on another rock in her armchair with her time-limited ancient cat is my mother, with the lava licking at her still-freezing feet.
Oh where are the eagles? Where are they?
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Enjoy the journey (or get stuffed if you’d rather.).com