I haven’t seen anything appear through a search yet, but both Brian Williams and Keith Olbermann mentioned that, as the people gathered at the Kennedy Center to honor Tm Russert, a rainbow appeared over the NBC Washington Studios.
That is such a lovely and uplifting piece of synchronicity.
Not surprisingly, there are no rainbows over here in the mountains — just lots of thunder and rain and some kind of blight happening on my little “oasis in the wildnerness” garden. And I can’t take a photo of it to see if anyone knows what it is because I dropped my little camera while away the other weekend, and it broke. I bought a new little one but haven’t had the time to figure it all out yet or download the software.
Meanwhile, despite taking an antidepressant, my mom is having more frequent bouts of uncontrollable crying. She keeps asking for her husband, my dad, who passed away almost 25 years ago.
We are sitting at the table, and she is eating some spaghetti with a roasted sweet red pepper sauce that I make. She decided that she doesn’t like tomato sauce and she doesn’t like straight alfredo sauce, so I mix my pureed sweet roasted red peppers with a little alfredo, and she wolfs it down.
“Where are your children,” she asks.
“They live far away,” I answer. ” Where are yours?”
She looks at me and says, “I don’t know.”
I don’t know which is worse, Alzheimer’s or “old age” dementia. With Alzheimer’s you don’t realize that you’re not remembering. With dementia, you are torn apart by a sense that you can’t remember even though you want to.
I look back at my original blog, which I began in November of 2001. At that point, I was already taking care of my mom, living across the hall from her in a senior citizen apartment building. Even back then, when she wasn’t so bad yet, I was struggling to have some sort of life apart from caregiving. With each month that went by, I lost more and more of my own life.
I never thought that it would all go on for so long.
No wonder I’m burned out.