Serious fail

Just saying, not being melodramatic, just factual.  If suicide was available, i would consider it. Start planning options. My preferences, like no drowning, no hanging, do limit the field and that is probably good. Maybe. I guess. 

My close friends and my doctor know i have struggled with this for years and especially since Don got very ill.

In bad times like tonight, one thing holds me back. I promised myself i would stay while my dad and my love were here – in this particular time/space – because i knew it would hurt them too much.

My dad is long gone, and relatively peacefully. He was ready to go and advanced cancer and a whack of sedatives set him free. My long-serving caregiving sister is beginning to reclaim her life and i rejoice for her.

I have been so often tempted to cheat and i say to myself, well your love knows you no more, you are free.

Strangely,  I am almost eager to see what i will do and feel when i am actually free of those moral bonds. The real test. Will I decide to leave, no regrets? Or, an enormous weight of trama resolved, will I live the last few years of my life with the joy i feel just outside the reach of my soul?

I am so curious to find out. The inner me has been so stripped by my love’s dementia, anything could emerge.

But so much for if and when.

He sometimes, given time and space, does know my being, of course not my name and not who-in-the-world i am, — no relational structures, human or spacial,  of any kind, mean anything now –  but once in awhile, after time to sort things out, he smiles in his eyes, and holds my hand and sometimes hugs or kisses me, when possible.

Which brings me to today’s epic fail. A faulure of system communication, a failure of compassion (well that would be the health system’s management of long term care in bc altogether) , a cascade of issues including a failure of the unit LPNs or care aides to answer for 2 hours my repeated fail-safe phone call to alert my pending visit.

(All cool nothing to see here All reformed and good to go. Oh yeah,  except the day shift staff have been unable to answer the phone, for hours, for days and days. Short staffed or just ignoring family calls?)

All this, AND he is delivered 15 minutes late on a 30 minute once a week date,  the 4th precious 30 minutes in 10 weeks. It takes my love 15 minutes to recover from the journey from his safe ward to strangeness.

All this leads to emotional catastrophe for me, and maybe a bad day for an inexperienced rec aide who was just filling in.

My love will remember nothing, not even the part where, after  sitting at the table, and calming down from that long journey through various locked doors, and us playing games with a stuffed toy he pushed toward me, me carefully not touching it because of the rules,  after 10 minutes, he slowly shakily  reached out for my hand and i stretched a tiny finger to him…

He will not remember. I will always wish i had died before i was forced to pull that finger back. “Ma’am that’s against the rules, Ma’am you will have to leave. Take it up with Bonnie Henry.”

Care? Compassion?

All I can think tonight is how i failed to protect him.