It's Sunday morning. Yesterday I drove out to see my parents and my brother, at my parents' house. (A little under three hours there, a little over two hours coming back in the evening when the traffic was lighter.) My dad had asked us to come out so that they can go over the terms of the Living Trust that they set up some years ago and never got around to explaining to us. What prompted this is that my dad's health has worsened lately.
Originally I was going to write another post about dealing with difficult emotions, but just setting the stage turned into a post of its own so let me start with that. I'll write the other next. The Living Trust that they have set up is pretty standard: when one of them dies the other becomes sole Trustee, and when that one dies my brother and I become Trustees jointly. They have the framework set up and they have put most of their big property into the Trust. A lot of the forms have blanks that they have yet to fill out: for example, they each have forms assigning Power of Attorney for Health Issues, first to each other and second to me (there wasn't room to add my brother's name too), but the forms specifically say "This Power of Attorney applies specifically to decisions regarding the following topics (initial all that apply)" ... and then they haven't initialed any of the topics yet. And so on. So there is still work to do. Presumably they will start pulling us in more and more when it becomes obviously necessary ... this means, I guess, when one of them dies and the other starts feeling weak, though maybe it should be earlier than that just in case of the unexpected. They said that they chose me to have the Power of Attorney for health care because I've probably dealt more with hospitals than Brother has (what with all of Wife's medical conditions over the years); on the other hand, while he and I are both listed as co-Trustees equally, they figured that it would probably make sense for Brother to be the one more closely involved with handling their financial affairs just because he lives a couple hours nearer to them than I do. That's fine with me. If this were Wife's family, and I were Wife (or any of her relatives), I'd worry that this would allow Brother to steal everything and leave me with pocket change: that's the way Wife's family treats each other. But in the first place I don't for a minute think Brother would do that; and in the second, I wouldn't be all that hurt if he did. Disappointed from a moral point of view, yes; but it's not like I'm counting on any huge inheritance from them for anything. Anyway, it makes sense because he's closer.
The reason my dad's health has suddenly gotten a lot worse is that he's a damned fool. He has Type 2 diabetes, in addition to a heart condition and some other incidental ailments. Some years ago his doctor prescribed a strict regimen of diet and medicine and exercise for him. Well, he's never been very good about the exercise. But by following a strict vegan diet he found that he felt a lot better than he had in years. He lost weight, he had more energy, ... life was good. So he decided he was cured: he stopped taking his medicines, and he stopped following his diet. And of course he started feeling worse again. Somehow he didn't connect his feeling worse with going off of his medicines or his diet, and so he didn't go back on them. Or see his doctor. By the next time he finally did see his doctor – much later, for something almost inconsequential – he had done significant damage to his heart and the rest of his system. He was retaining water, his lungs were filling with fluid, he couldn't sleep or even lie down, his heart had enlarged (and was therefore competing with his lungs for space in his body cavity), ... he was a mess. Well, the doctor injected him with a massive diuretic so that he lost fourteen pounds – all of it urnie – by his next appointment. (At this point Brother joked, "Gosh, I wish I could lose fourteen pounds that easily," so of course I asked him, "You mean you're looking for a chance to piss it all away?") Apparently he is now sleeping again, though he still looks like hell. He is more stooped than ever, and several times in the course oif the visit he had to lean forward and hunch up his shoulders even while sitting in order to make sure he could breathe well enough. So it was kind of depressing watching him suffer like this, and it was irritating to realize that it was all (or mostly) his own god-damned fault for being an idiot. There was probably a time when I would have had more compassion for self-inflicted suffering, but the years with Wife seem to have burned it out of me.
As I have been writing this, a thought came to me that never surfaced yesterday while I was there: Where was my mother in all of this? Why wasn't she minding him, and making him take his damned medicine and eat his kale-and-okra? I've said before, I'm sure, that their relationship reminds me a lot of mine with Wife: my father, like Wife, is an overgrown toddler, completely self-centered and with no discipline. Somebody has to be the grown-up. In my case, I realized early on (not early enough, but that's another story) that it was going to have to be me; and so for the next two decades and more Wife complained bitterly that I was trying to control her life ... all because somebody had to, and she plainly wasn't going to do it. My mother leads a grown-up life in some respects – she holds a job, for instance, despite my father repeatedly imploring her to find some kind of home-based business so she doesn't have to leave him during the day. But she doesn't tell him what to do. She doesn't make him follow his doctor's orders, or eat right, or get his ass off the sofa and around the block to get a little exercise. In that respect she is very passive. And I think probably I need to talk to her about this, some time when my father isn't around. I'm not sure when that might be.
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