In a way I do,
at least in the beginning. I was her beneficiary and I knew that if she stayed
at home all her money would go to her at-home care, and when that ran out, my
husband and I would be footing the bill as we already were for his own mother.
It would be putting us in a deep financial hole that I didn’t feel was fair to
my husband who has worked his ass off his entire life since age 14. These are
all my “excuses” for allowing medicade to pick up the tab for a woman who paid into
the system her entire life also, since age 16.
What
I find surprising, in retrospect, is how much I was in denial about her health.
I always pride myself on being so brutally honest about facing the truth, but
when it came to my own mother, I actually never thought she was as “bad off” as
she really was; so I would feel guilty that she should be left with 2 other
“out of it” roommates in a nursing home. I went there almost every day, engaged
her in Bingo and all the other activities they offered, and refused to notice
how under par her participation was.
For years I would tease her that if she ever
stopped playing scrabble, I’d know it was time to call the undertaker. We
played Scrabble all day, almost every day, for the last ten years of her life
that she relocated from FL to CA (before the nursing home). We would call
ourselves “Scrabble Sluts” and stay up til 2 or 3 a.m. hard at work playing
cut-throat games. But, it was in the nursing home, when she started playing her
own weird game that I could no longer deny the writing on the wall. Still, I
felt guilty then and still feel a twinge now and then until I snap myself out
of it and take a realistic look at the facts. The woman was in no condition to
be at home the last 18 months of her life, so let her, and it, RIP.
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