I’ve just discovered this new video, which I am told is “going viral.” I hope so, because it’s affected me quite strongly this morning. I hope you like it and pass it on:

I hardly know how to begin, but I have to try, in order to save myself.

Those of you who have gone through something similar will understand at least a little, or maybe a lot. We’re all the same and yet so different. It’s one thing to say, “My mother has been diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s.” [Note: diagnosis not official after all. - JHF] It’s quite another thing to say that this has happened to Helen Farr. That makes this the Helen & Johnny Chronicles as well, of course, and only I can tell the story of what’s going on now with both of us.

The one who gave me birth

Sobbing in the carport of this stupid, stinking trailer, completely broken, swatting bugs and staggering, trapped here now in the hell-hole that is Tucson. Why does anybody live here? I can’t imagine. Unbearable, putrid heat all day and night, humid too, this time of year, with millions of mosquitoes in the goddamned desert. If ever a city deserved to die, this one does. It shouldn’t even exist, running on water that fell as rain back in the Pleistocene. But why am I talking about Tucson? What’s this place ever done to me??

I freely admit that my Tucson experience has always been colored by the hell of familial disfunction. I could tell you about the time my father was drunk, crying, and threatening violence as my wife and I were leaving, both parents wielding knives and screaming… so we took my mother with us to a McDonald’s on the outskirts of town. We all shared cardboard burgers we couldn’t taste and then my wife and I drove off, leaving my mother to wait long enough for the old man to pass out so she could call a taxi. But oh, there was so much more. There is so much more.

My father died back in the ’80s from lung cancer at age 67, not long after he told me, shaking with rage, that “No one knows what goddamned hell it’s been to live with that woman!” This isn’t a preface to an indictment of my mother, but rather to show the ground in which the current catastrophe has grown. Not from which, but in which — the larger tale is steeped in karmic mystery, of course. I can tell you what I know of what’s happened in my lifetime that relates, and perhaps I will, if I am able. Years of Jungian analysis has taught me how to shine a light into the catacombs where I’m always anchored, though my eyes are in the sky.

The present disaster has many layers, twists, and turns, which makes a linear narrative quite difficult. And always there’s the context, the heaving, painful, hideous tapestry of lies and idiocy, greed and nonsense, drenched in tears and blood. Yes, blood. You might not see it, but it’s there. So maybe some will understand when I say that when I heard that Helen was in the hospital with pneumonia and that my brother and sister needed me to come, I heard the banshees wail.

South of Socorro, on the way to Arizona

She’s sitting 15 feet away now as I write this, at least as lucid as she was when I was last here almost two years ago. Her dementia (or whatever it is) phases in and out, like the moon moving behind the clouds. Earlier today she all but needed physical restraint, but dementia is easier to deal with than the periods of so-called sanity. I live in dread of those right now, because I’ve already started taking over all the finances, and in this state she might remember. I’ve gathered up the credit cards and checkbooks, taken control of various accounts through power of attorney vested in me years ago if this should come to pass. I wonder if she knows she agreed to this just last Friday, at her bank. Please God, don’t let her ask about it now: I can’t take another fit of screaming.

She hears voices almost all the time. A common theme is sex and dope parties at the neighbors, late at night, people voting for her and against her, whisperings in the dark. An hour ago she came out from the bedroom and wanted to know who that woman was I’d been talking to. I told her I’d been sitting here at my computer the whole time, totally alone. We’ve actually “discussed” the idea of a nursing home, easier when she’s in a weakened state from which acquiescence almost flows. She doesn’t think it’s time, of course, but then she thinks I’m here just visiting. JUST VISITING??? I’ve cried for days, not knowing what to do or where to turn, and she has no idea. I’d say it’s more than I can bear, except I seem to still be here, where I would never want to be.

The pneumonia almost killed her and left her with a concrete-hard mass of congealed pus outside her lungs, restricting their expansion. My sister (a nurse) came out from California to oversee the situation, discussed this with my mother, and both agreed there’d be no major surgery to correct it. No extraordinary measures, no derring-do, let nature take its course, etc. At the same time, my sister, overcome with guilt, decided she would quit her job in LA to stay here and take care of mom — a position she’d only recently gotten after earning her nursing degree at the age of 50. With this decision in her mind, she allowed the hospital to release Helen for home care, thinking that she and my brother could manage the daily injections of antibiotics into the kick-line (IV) that Helen would need for several weeks more. That’s not the end of this installment, though.

While this was going on, I was on my way to Tucson in a rental car, straining against the loss of every mile that brought me closer to the vortex. It was like driving through giant thunderstorms of pain, and when I hit the Arizona line, I slowed down, knowing… Rolling into Tucson at midnight and 92 degrees, I headed for Helen’s other trailer, the luxurious double-wide she’d recently abandoned for the awful place she lives in now — this requires a separate episode — where I could camp out in the wreckage of my mother’s life and get some rest before heading over in the morning. While I was still asleep the next morning, my cell phone rang. It was my wife in Taos, who’d gotten up early and read the email from my sister:

“Sweetie, I know youre not up yet, but I wanted you to know: M____ has gone back to Los Angeles!”

Oh really? Oh God.

I didn’t have to know the reason, though. The context, remember. Always the context. Of course, she’d seen that everything was impossible, never mind her best intentions. Not only was Helen raving mad and vicious when she wasn’t, but my sister had realized she couldn’t quit her job and lose her health insurance, since she’d just had surgery for thyroid cancer and needed radiation treatments. No money would be forthcoming from Helen, either, since the dispensing of funds is always tied to coercion in the name of “doing what’s best.” No hope of getting compensation for giving up her life to stay here, then, assuming she could stand it.

I walked in the door and found Helen sitting in her chair, seemingly completely out of it. I bent down to give her a hug. She knew who I was, but not that I had come from Taos. The morning did not go swimmingly. She obviously couldn’t be left alone and yet there wasn’t anyone to take care of her. No one person can, certainly not my brother. Not me, not my sister, either. No one to take care of her, and what to do? Now everything was up to me, and here I sit, almost a full week later, Helen babbling constantly through the entire writing of this post.

Babble, babble, babble, each absurdity inviting an exasperated response I dare not utter.

I took her to a doctor on Friday (as soon as I could manage it), hoping to get some help, but he wasn’t her “primary care physician,” who wasn’t available anyway, so the idiot could do nothing except tell me to take Helen to the emergency room and leave her there. That’s right: ABANDON MY MOTHER at the hospital door and walk away! This advice came from a doctor,, and he’s not the only one who told me so.

This is America in 2008. This is what we have to answer for, all of us, and I’m white-hot with rage.

The old woman is circling around the flame like a demented moth.

What drives her now? Is it Death? No matter what we call it, there’s nothing I can do about it. Her lungs are a pneumonia-ridden mess. She’s probably had it for a long time, low-grade, and now her chest is filled with secondary crud and blockages they can’t get to without opening her up. She’s almost 87 and doesn’t want the pulmonary surgery. Maybe she’s not so crazy, after all. Except that she is, of course. Word is she can focus on some things and seems to understand, but then forgets, and now she’s paranoid. Hears mocking, threatening voices.

The hospital is actually discharging her tomorrow, too, surprising all of us, even my 50-year-old baby sister (the nurse!), who’s come out from Los Angeles. My mother has to have some sort of IV in her arm at home, antibiotics for the pneumonia, and someone’s going to come by every day to check on that. My sister will stay there with her for most of the day and see how it goes. It’s come to this, then, helping with meals, getting the old lady to the shower — if she’ll cooperate — and keeping the IV going when she tries to pull it out. I can’t see this working out. It sounds more like a play instead of real life.

I was going to rent a car and shoot down to Tucson tomorrow to help my sister line up a nursing home, but that isn’t happening, not yet. The old woman would surely put up a fight, and who would take her in such condition anyway? I think the hospital is sending her home to die. I just wish someone would tell us straight, “a week or two, she’s going…” But they hardly ever do. And when it does happen, they’re usually wrong! When my mother-in-law was in bad shape, the doctors told my wife her mother had a week to live, at most. She’d stopped eating and drinking, and that was that. Then something happened and she ate a little bit. Suddenly she “got better” and lived another year — with raging dementia that stripped her of her dignity, but she lived a while. So there’s just no way to know.

Home care won’t work for Helen very long. She’d get abusive or inconsolable. No one could stand it, not even my sister, the brilliant registered nurse. If a nursing home is out, and she’s impossible to care for, something else is going on. Circling around the flame, all right. I’m beginning to realize that that’s the Plan, that nothing else is going to work.

She’s going to make me come see her, I know it. (This is even bracketing my birthday, right?) She’s going to hang on until I drive down there to hold her hand and watch her die, just like I had to do with Dad. I’ll walk in the door, and 10 minutes later she’ll be gone. You could take that to the bank, except we never know. Not really. But that would be just like her… She even has a fucking discount coupon for cremation! “Burn one, get one free,” or something like that. Probably picked it up when Dad died.

(Tighter circles now, wing scales popping on the pass…)

Thanks to everyone who’s left a message or sent me one!

Yes, it’s here, the actual calendar anniversary of my birth long ago in the wartime summer of 1945 in Bryan, Texas, YE GODS!!! And here’s a picture of me (look hard) with my mother, pretty young Helen Masson from Middle River, MD, taken a short while before my unveiling as first-born son. Take a good long look: this is the woman who’s now 86 years old, lying in a hospital bed in Tucson with her pneumonia-ravaged lungs filling up with fluid and only two days ago diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s — and I’m in there somewhere:

WWII is winding down…

And this is me, 3.5 weeks after popping out. Doesn’t look like I’m all that glad to be here, does it? Maybe it’s the fact of being born on Nagasaki Day… I tried to find an early picture of me smiling and drooling, but they don’t show up until a few months later. Guess I was really pissed.

That is one powerful set of brows

Finally, just because it’s my birthday, I want to play some music for you. You have to click on it, though. This is my new god, Slim Doucial, one of the forerunners of what we call Cajun music today, recorded back in the late 1920’s. Listen carefully! There’s a washtub bass in there, I swear, though it might just be a wonky low string on the guitar. The song is “Chere Yeux Noirs (Dear Black Eyes),” and I think it’s positively transcendental.

In a very real sense, absolutely!

Today is my “actual” birthday (from AstroDienst), with the sun lining up precisely with where it was when I was born in 1945 (!) at 9:25 p.m. tonight, rather than tomorrow, my calendar birthday. This has to do with the imprecision of the numbers, things slipping, the impossibility of our wretched artificial calendar ever truly reflecting the orbits of the stars and planets or the alignment of the galaxies. Not that precision really matters in this instance though. For my birthday, it’s more of a general field of energy with the needle pegging in the night:

Today is your astrological birthday, even though it may be different from your calendar birthday. As would seem appropriate with this transit, today is a day of new beginnings, and the influences you feel today will affect the entire year to come. However, this does not mean that the whole year will be disappointing if today doesn’t work out exactly as planned. You are receiving a new impulse from the energy center within you, as symbolized by the Sun. Therefore any new venture that you start at this time will ride the crest of this new energy and will very likely come to an acceptable conclusion. Whatever you do or begin today will bear the stamp of your individuality more than anything else. This is the day to assert yourself anew.

Detonated over beautiful Nagasaki on the day I was born

So I may do anything today, and that covers a LOT of ground. Actually, I’ve already thought of a couple of “new ventures” to launch. No, they don’t involve climbing Mt. Wheeler (13,151 feet). That was my intended birthday ritual, but what happened was that a couple of friends wanted to have a dinner party for me tomorrow, and I realized it was stupid to turn down such a friendly and generous offer. The mountain isn’t going anywhere, and I can try that next week if I don’t have to go to Tucson to find a nursing home for my mother or pick up her ashes from the funeral home. Life is strange, is it not?

One thing I’ve thought of involves writing more openly and matter-of-factly about intangibles. This could be tricky, because of all the ridicule it provokes and because I already have a deplorable tendency to manipulate and preach. Wow: just from writing that, I can already feel the self-censorship wanting to kick in — the thing that always holds me back — but what’s more important than personal truth? That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do in my life, to be as clean, clear, and true as possible, without conflicts, to go through life like a dophin without leaving a wake… And believe me, I’m all too well acquainted with the opposite.

Probably my favorite milagro

It strikes me that this is all about heart. Listening to and following my heart. Not about politics, economics, the environment, making a living, finding a home, what my old friends think of me, or what that lump is on the back of my neck. There have been times during the past couple of years when I’ve felt inexpressible joy and unity with all creation. Occasionally to the point of tears, like I was consumed by cosmic love and acceptance. NO SHIT! Hell, that happened once last week.

So Happy Birthday to you all, and we shall see what we shall see.

“Make Algae Biodiesel at Home!”

It’s a new era, all right.

My 86-year-old mother is in the hospital with pneumonia in Tucson and not making sense. It’s impressive, what that does to you. I might as well call this post “John Watch.”

My brother is worried that I’m not there and hopes I’m coming soon. That’s not how we do it, though. Just the sight of me might generate enough “crazy energy” in her to momentarily fool them into letting her go, and then where would we be? Haha. But seriously: no, not yet. And the doctor will sedate her if she tries to leave again.

My wife: ”Your mother can’t possibly ‘escape’ from a modern hospital. She’d never make it to the front door.”

Me: “Even if she could get out, it would never work. She’d have to take a taxi, and she’d never pay for one!”

She’s already convinced she’s dying. For all I know, she is. And it may sound harsh to strangers’ ears, but it’s like I can’t do anything for her until she does. Even if she comes out of this, she’d have to surrender and cooperate for me to get her into a nursing home, and that’s not going to happen. She isn’t rational any more. She hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t see how she’s managed to live on her own for the last 10 years, anyway.

I felt some pretty strong emotions today. Not sorrow, but more a reaction to the archetype, the elemental thing that’s going on with Death nearby. This is monumental with a parent, even one you’re not that close to.

My relationship with my mother is deep and dangerous. I could say she gave me birth and love, but then she tried to kill me (and never gave up). And yet, the more I glue the missing pieces back, there’s less need to blame her for leaving them out. I can talk to her openly and with compassion, from a distance, anyway, and sense the spirit of a person, not my “mother,” and that person is all right. The last time I talked to her was like that. I just ignored the crazy parts and the arrows bounced right off. Then she seemed to shift gears, maybe out of boredom, and we connected for a little while, as equals.

That might have been the last time. it’s out of my hands, for sure.

Interesting…

Example A: was $360K, now $279K and the owner will look at “any” offers. Example B: was $675K, now $395K. Whoa! That’s a drop of over 40 percent. The paper is full of ads with “REDUCED!” banners on them. And here the conventional wisdom was that this would never happen because Taos is an “end destination” resort, etc. etc. Yeah, yeah.

Looks like my wife has found a studio, by the way, so for now the pressure is off on the issue of moving from our scenic adobe hovel on the hillside. We’ll keep looking, of course, but the main job now is getting a certain baby grand down here from Dubuque. After that the snows will come, and we will move or not, depending.

One step at a time, but at least there’s movement.

The old lady [see previous post] was admitted to the hospital yesterday, and yes, she has pneumonia. She’s also tried twice to “escape” and almost succeeded last night in ripping the IV out of her arm and making it to the hallway. Urk.

So it’s come to this.

The next step is “chemical restraint,” i.e. sedation, and I think I know what comes next: she either eats or doesn’t, and then they ask us if we want to keep her going. She’s going to “escape,” all right, one way or the other, but I don’t think she’ll be coming home again.

Full circle in Tucson, AZ coming up, maybe. My oh my.

Mine turns 87 this year, and we forgot to stage The Intervention. Too bad, not that it would have worked.

She lives in a so-called “mobile home community” in Tucson. What that really means is single-wides and double-wides close together, baking in the sun below a mountain, an aluminum hive of isolation and prep for final staging. She decided she wanted to move from the home she’d occupied for 30 years and go live in a smaller place to makes things easier, which sounded dubious to me, but sure: buy another trailer, let me and my siblings clean up the old one with all the junk and get it sold while she’s still alive. Much tidier that way. Only she didn’t tell me the place she’d bought was furnished and even had all the kitchen equipment, glasses, and utensils! None of which she threw away…

What’s more, she had most of her own furniture brought over too. There must be hardly any room to turn around inside, and now she can’t even unpack her own kitchen things because a dead man’s plates are in the cupboard. Just another sign, as if I needed one.

I have a nearby brother who’s going through hell with this. For three days she lays there in here bed, depressed, and won’t get up, says she has trouble breathing. My brother tries to take her to the hospital, but she refuses to go. Then she calls him in the night and says she’s dying (can’t breathe), call 911. He does, they come, and she gets up out of bed to talk to them. They see she’s ambulatory and refuse to take her. This afternoon she calls to tell me she’s dying and that I have to come “take care of things.” She isn’t dead yet, though, just moving through the world without her mind and wants attention. She wants me there to clean the cupboards out, unpack her stuff, get tangled up in other people’s goods now, see lawyers, sign papers, put her old place on the block. But what she wants is out of sequence, and I see she isn’t really here much anymore. For all that, rational argument is a waste of time.

So now it’s come to this. Her way out, if this is what it is, will be a messy one. She refuses guidance, has no friends, and shreds your psyche if you try to help. My job is detachment and compassion. There’s a pretty 18-year-old girl from Middle River deep inside, red hair blowing in the wind. I’ve talked to her, too, in moments when the walls were down.

For now, I’m doing nothing. That’s all I can do until “something happens” and we step in to protect her. I’m certainly not going to Tucson, at least not yet.

(That way yields madness, and I’ve paid my dues already.)