bossman

I just got back from a shameless trip to my parents’ house to do some free laundry and beg for money, since I am broker than broke and don’t want the electricity or gas shut off. It didn’t really go as planned. I know things aren’t perfect at Casa de Voegtlin lately with my grandfather, slowly slipping into dementia, and my uncle, a handful at times, both there to be taken care of, but I sort of thought that between Mom and Dad, they could handle it, and with the nurse Pam that comes every now and then and the adult day care taking up most of the days for grandpa… it would be quite manageable. What I keep forgetting, or denying, or something, is that Dad has cancer. Nothing is easy for him… and we’re in a bad phase right now with lots of chemo treatments and surgeries and painkillers and lack of appetite and weight loss and energy loss. He’s pretty off right now, and he knows it. At one point during my visit, we had a little sit-down talk, simply about how hard things are for him right now and how much he is messing up. If you thought I was out of character lately with my instability, you should take a look at the great bossman.

I wanted to offer my help. And I did run some errands for mom to get some dinner supplies and other groceries and kitchen items as well as put some gas in a rental car and such… but that’s about the limit of my abilities right now. Hopefully, that kind of help is all they need, because I can’t offer much in the way of emotional support. I felt totally emotionally crippled, just seeing Dad so weak and Mom so frazzled from the “three ring circus” going on around her. I felt useless and ineffective, just like I do with most of my life lately, but this was somehow different. Maybe because I’d never felt that way about home before.