Deflection

The sun is out today, with the temperature at 38 degrees. The snow is now melting fast. And, without the snow, the temperatures are rising without the fog. I went hiking this morning, but I am sure that the trails would be muddy now. 

As of today, I have been retired for two years. As a part of life, in someways it seems like it was yesterday, but in others it seems like it has been four years. My work was so intensive and the highway projects took so long to develop. It is like the US 52 causeway project that I was working on between Sabula, Iowa, and Savanna, Illinois. During our family reunion in September, my cousins were asking me when the project was going to start. Since I am not around the programming of the projects anymore, I have no idea when the project is going to happen. Therefore, from my point of view, it seems like the project should be happen, so it seems like it was yesterday that I was working on this project. All of the comments from my retirement seems like they were made yesterday, and, in October, I watched the videos of my retirement with my cousin and his wife, and that has kept my retirement short. 

The first few months of my retirement I really enjoyed and I thought that it would be a precursor to my retirement. I would read in the morning, get some exercise, listen to a lecture from a video course that I was interested in at the time, and write in the afternoon and evenings, when my mind was share. This is when I started my blog. Everything was going fine, until I put my place up for sale. Then, after getting pneumonia, I had to rush to get out of my house. From there, things have not been that good.

With the housing industry taking a hit and my mom suffering from dementia, it seemed like the best thing for me to do was to move in with my mom. As for my mom, she was really living in fear when I moved in with her and, today, she is living a comfortable life. With me being there everyday, I feel that I have given her the stability that she has needed going though the brain deterioration of dementia. 

I feel like today was a sad day, since I saw the obituary of Betty McManaway. Ed and Betty moved south of Whitewater in 1974 to start farming, and Ed became dad’s excavator for his home construction business. Later, after dad was no longer in the construction business, Betty came in as the administrator in the Century 21, Real-Estate Office. Therefore, my whole family got to know the McManaways. About the time that I got to Whitewater in 2022, Betty was put in the dementia ward of a nursing home. On Monday, Betty passed away at the age of 85. As I have been told by so many caregivers, once a dementia person is placed in a dementia ward, they are gone in 18 months. This holds true with Betty. I feel fortunate that I have been with mom over the past 18 months and I feel that I have given her another two years to live.

The major problem over the past 18 months have been others when it comes to mom’s caregiving. For example, as the caregivers keep telling me, once a dementia person is in the nursing home, eighteen months and they are gone, but I have had others tell me that this is old school. Well it is not old school for Betty. This is the major problem with well meaning people that are not aware of this issues with dementia people and they are forcibly telling the 27/7 caregiver what is going on with the patient. This is sad. 

As for my retirement, the stress that has come from these uneducated well meaning people on the topic of dementia has made my life totally impossible. I just moved in to spend time with my mom afflicted with dementia. To me, it was the humanitarian thing to do, since our parents took care of us growing up, now it is time for us to take care of our patents, as we were taught by our grandparents.

Was it a mistake to move in with mom, not from the difference that I have made in my mom’s life. But, when it comes to the relationships that I have destroyed, the answer is no. It stated when I came home from high school, my mom was always home for me. We would always talk for at least a half an hour before I went out and work on what needed to be done are home for the family business, like working with firewood or in the shop working on equipment, and we would talk about any subject in depth, especially me farming the eighty acres. Since then, we have all ways talked in depth about any topic that we thought was worth covering. For the all most forty years that I was in Iowa, we talked on the phone every week. Now, when I sit next to mom and I ask her if she is fine, with brain deterioration, she says, “I am fine because you are here.” 

As for the others that are around mom, well it has gotten to the point that I have to put distance between me and them, unfortunately, but this is life in the 2020s, since others are also going through the frustration that I am. So much for the values taught to us be our grandparents.

I am retired, and I worked hard to living the stress free life that I was living for a few months after I retired. I do not feel that I should be living the highly stressful life that others are putting on me in around mom’s care. I will never say that I was wrong to spend the time with mom. But, should have I started building my house in 2022? That is still a hard question to answer. Considering mom’s improvements in her demeanor in September, I decided to delay my house until May of 2024. And now, I wish that I was set up to start construction in 2023, but I failed to get the driveway in last fall. It seems like I go from one dilemma to another dilemma.

Roger