Loose ends

I wonder if it’s biological thing, some kind of learned behavior, or something else altogether, but letting go seems like it’s the hardest thing to do. And life is basically about doing that, over and over.

I don’t have anything meaningful to say here. Nothing poignant, no advice, no grand observations.

I miss my mom. I miss helping her take care of my dad. I miss that being part of my identity. I didn’t just lose her. I lost what I was doing. There’s no other life to return to. Just a snap of a finger and everything’s suddenly different.

My feelings are valid, but they’re obviously tinted with nostalgia. Being a caregiver was meaningful but it also sucked, and right now I’m obviously ignoring all the bad parts I experienced.

But at least, I understood it.

It’s been almost three years since I dropped out of the world I knew, a world that is now gone, and thirty-two-year-old me is also gone. I’m trying to build a new life, but I weirdly don’t know how to do it. How many times do I catch myself staring off into the distance, lost? How many times do I randomly catch my heart pounding in my chest and my breathing turning to panting? How many times to do I suddenly pause and realize I just don't care about whatever it is I'm doing?

These days, my brother sends me photos of my dad in his memory care center. I’m happy for him, but I’m also left thinking, Hey wait that’s supposed to be me taking care of him…

Some days, I make the mistake of peeking into my old cameras that I put around the house to check in on my parents, but all I see are pieces of furniture disappearing one by one as my brother diligently makes progress on cleaning the house. Sometimes, I want to ask him to stop, though I never do. Sometimes, I call him anyway because I miss him and want to hang out with him and be the little brother again.

Some days I run into people in the busy city streets and I no longer know how to deal with their brand of anxiety, the ways every individual deals with days, weeks, months and then years of tiny aggressions that simmer and then explode when one of us accidentally bumps into the other on a train. I only know how to deal with my parents’ brand of craziness now, the kind where my dad just straight up makes shit up and yells at me or yells at my mom, or just forgets who we are.

And then there’s myself. I’m like a computer that tells you it needs to restart because there’s an update, which I ignore, and then suddenly once it’s too late and I realize that that computer really is about to shut down and I scramble to save everything I was doing—but it’s always too late. Some days, I don’t realize that I need to shut down until I’ve already shut down, unable to do anything other than feel myself breathe, before restarting again.

I never expected the hardest thing would be to leave the caregiving identity behind.

But change comes for you. I guess you can resist it, but it always wins, and it chases you tackles you to the ground and suffocates you if you fight it, and sometimes even when you don’t.

Letting go is supposed to be natural. Babies are born. Children grow. Parents become empty-nesters. People retire, even caregivers retire.

I guess I just spent so much time and energy struggling to learn how to be a caregiver. I don’t know how to not be one. And I’m not quite sure how to move on, or how to be okay with not knowing, how to move on.

There’s that scene in Shawshank Redemption where the guy who finally leaves prison, but can’t get a grasp on how to live as a ‘free man’ because the world looks so different and so he just hangs himself.

I’m not going to hang myself; the concept just resonates with me.

“How is your mom?” I remember my dad saying one of the last times I saw him.

I struggled, and will struggle for the rest of his life, and my life, with how to respond to this question. Because even though I have my prepared answer, I will always wonder if this time, this time, I should try telling him the truth again.

“She’s good,” I said, and will probably go back to saying as my default answer. I’ll include a smile, as always.

He nodded, and will continue to nod. “She’s not in the hospital?”

“She’s home now.”

“Tell her to come visit me.”

My heart will break, as it always does.

My dad has always seemed to live in his own imagination, in the past, seeing things that weren’t there, acting in whatever way made sense to his brain. He always lived in the reality he wanted—even before the Alzheimer’s.

I hated that about him. I always wanted him to see reality as it was, or at least closer to how it seemed to me.

But now, I don’t know. For once, I really wish his reality, the one where my mom is still alive, was actually the real one.