I am exhausted. Depressed. Overwhelmed.
Now that my step-father (who raised me) is dying, it seems my mother is taking this opportunity to pull out all the crazy. To me it seems like she’s taking advantage of the situation to be even more inappropriate and abusive than normal. Maybe she’s not consciously doing this… but man… she’s a disgusting handful. But that’s not the whole story.
My step-father has been married to my mother for almost 30 years. He is insanely secretive. My mother didn’t even know how old he was. We found out through the hospital that he is six years older than he always told my mother that he was. I, however, was never allowed to know how old he really was… not until my mother got overwhelmed enough to finally spill the secret beans. If his age was a huge secret, can you imagine what truly important things he has also hidden? We have just discovered the tip of the ice berg…
Because step-dad is old and has obviously been declining over the last couple years, mom started pressing him to put all legal/financial papers in one place so that she’d have resources when he died. Before then, he only told her that on the day he died a man that she doesn’t know would come to her and give her all the information. Nevermind that this put my mother in a very vulnerable spot with regards to con-men. She pressed him until he gave her a safety deposit box key claiming that it had everything that she would need. Since he was incapacitated and we were told that he would die very soon, we opened the box. Empty. Completely empty.
We started searching the house. We found a secret bank account where his social security payments are deposited. We also found evidence of secret credit cards. So far we have found $22K in secret credit card debt.
I found some benefit information and started making calls to find out details on pension and life insurance, so we’d know what kind of income my mother will have. $15K in life insurance. That’s it. $15 freakin’ thousand bucks. No joke. He kept my mother isolated and didn’t let her learn any life skills and he leaves here with $15K?????? It’s like in death he wanted to give her one big “fuck you!” That doesn’t make sense, because he did seem to love her and they did get along… it just doesn’t make sense. I have some small hope that we will find some other life insurance policy that will actually be capable of supporting my mother. She’s only in her mid 50’s. She prolly has a long life yet to live and she will need financial support.
As his wife, she will be entitled to half his social security and half his pension upon his death. It’s hard to say if that will be enough as we’re still trying to find the pieces to this puzzle.
At this point, it seems like this man who claimed all these years to have set up my mother for a good life after his death was lying. He’s not even dead and I’m mourning. I’m mourning the man I thought he was and apparently never was. To me, the man who raised me (as faulted as I knew he was then) died last week when we realized that he has lied and lied and lied about some extremely important things. As things stand now, most likely she will be very dependent on me (ew… I can’t stand to even be in the same room with her… agh) and may need to declare bankrupcy. Just what I need. The sexually, mentally and abusive woman that I wish would just disappear from my life dependent on me. It’s all so disgustingly depressing.
As for step-dad, we were told he wouldn’t last the night a week ago. Since then, against all odds, he has been gaining strength, even though his heart is barely beating – literally. After a few days in the hospital, he became paranoid and decided that me and my mother were trying to kill him and that we didn’t really have him in a hospital… he thought we had him in some secret prison or something. No joke. He was screaming and yelling… it was horrible. It took four nurses to hold down this half-dead man long enough to sedate him with something in a syringe. Since that incident, they have been keeping him on huge doses of Ativan to keep him calm…. but when he starts gaining his senses again the paranoia comes back and only increases until someone gives him another dose of Ativan and Morphine. I have no idea how a heart that is so weak can sustain such physical violence and screaming. It is possible that he will survive in this state for months or even years. It’s sad to contemplate. I don’t want anyone to die… but it’s also terrible to watch someone live in such paranoid delusion and otherwise drugged stupor.
We were trying to set him up in home hospice, because when he was still making sense (before the paranoia) the docs explained that treatment would do little to help his chances for survival and he told us that because of this he didn’t want treatment… cuz it was likely pointless and he’d rather not have surgery and all that if it’s not going to make a difference. It took some doing, but I convinced my mother to honor his wishes. Me and my mother both had the same instinct to do whatever treatment we could do because there was at least a chance that it would improve his chance of survival. But, what is most important to me is that his wishes are respected and I was able to get mom to tow that line… and so, hospice it is.
The problem is… he can’t come home. My mother would be his only caretaker and he needs 24/7 care. We’re not completely sure yet, but we are assuming at this point that there won’t be enough money to hire in home helpers for when my mom is sleeping or when she needs assistance in caring for him. He cannot even feed himself or sit up on his own nor do the docs expect him to improve much. He needs a very high level of care. That means we need a nursing home – something he told my mother that he never wanted. It is heartbreaking to me that he is going to end up in a nursing home (even with all the secrets and betrayal). I suspect that the nursing home will just cause more paranoia, combativeness and delusion. As angry as I am, I also don’t want him to suffer. This just sucks. I wish we could afford home care. 
Meh… drama.
In the meantime, I am fighting my instincts to curl in a ball and do nothing about anything. Nevermind that the apartment is a huge mess. It’s a struggle to master my feelings of being overwhelmed and actually get anything done. I worry that self-care and all that will go out the window… exercise, cleaning apartment and all that. So far, I’ve been able to push through to some extent, but sometimes it is still so hard. It’s hard even without the drama due to my depression and PTSD. I keep reminding myself that I’m a much happier person if I take care of things. It helps… hopefully the struggle will become easier in time. Just about everything feels like a struggle right now.
–AngryGrayRainbows
I dunno about you, but my brain tends to work in ironic ways just like this one. Even accepting very negative feelings about something can help me to face it and bring all sorts of good things into my life that denial of the negative feelings kept me from. 
These ads appeared in my Sunday newspaper.
PhD Coachy said something that stuck with me the other day. He said that a kid once brought into his office a book of amazing lego models which included a picture of a landspeeder (pictured at left) and he was glad to learn the name of this mode of transportation, because he thought about it from time to time.
