The Wedge

nat annie and bill
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

So the QOB has decided that she loves the Wedge brewery and the River Arts District in general and she wants to live in a studio there and watch the trains go by. That would be great if a) there were studios you could live in for sale down by the river that were handicapped accessible and all that good stuff and b) if we hadn't spent the morning with her case manager and therapists from CarePartners, who stated categorically that she absolutely, positively cannot live alone but in fact really needs 24 hour care. We had suspected as much but having it confirmed by professionals was simultaneously sort of a relief and a total sorrow. We've wavered and gone back and forth and back and forth on this, from well, do we have the moral right to keep her here in Asheville when she wants to go back to New York to, but then, if you realize that sending her to New York is almost certainly a death sentence, is that morally right either? And actually, I don't have the answers to those questions still and part of me just doesn't know if I ever will. In the meantime we're just taking the QOB to the Wedge Brewery more or less every night to drink beer and admire the trains and John Payne's wonderful garden fence.

What I do know now though, or what has been confirmed that I know is that the QOB has something called vascular dementia and that it mostly, but not all, came from the stroke. I know that she herself does not recognize this because she has something else with a long name that means her reality is not what the rest of us humans generally consider consensus reality but instead is a construct of weird flashes where time and space and memory are not the same as they are here on our planet. I also know that she is probably not going to get much better. I know that she cannot really read; she is faking it. I know that she cannot count to three and probably never will again. I know that she is spatially confused to the point where she is unable to find her way across an unfamiliar room. Not building - a room. One room. At the same time as all this I know that she is still charming, still funny as hell, still smart, still sweet and still, sometimes, for an hour or even two or three, pretty damn lucid.

That's a good thing, because she's going to have to live with me. In the meantime, over the next four weeks while I
1) pack up my house and -
2) pack up my mother's house, which also entails getting rid of 90% of her many things and -
3) close on my house at the end of the month and -
4) get my friend A and a crack team of Baltimore construction guys down here to tear out the carpet, put an arch & window in the kitchen wall, build a glass brick fence and a whole bunch of other stuff I can't think of now as well as creating a small apartment for the QOB in my new blue basement, which also will entail figuring out a way to heat it and -
5) move all my stuff and all of the QOB's stuff from New York to my new house and probably also a whole lot of my Mom's stuff and possibly/probably my brothers' stuff as well to my new house and -
6) make appointments for the QOB with the eye doctor and -
7) get her supplementary insurance and -
8) figure out her financial status and talk with an eldercare lawyer and -
9) meet again with accountants and lawyers and financial planners about my mothers estate and -
10) mourn my mother -
we're going to have to figure out somewhere else for the QOB to live rather than in the heart of the chaos with my mother's house being disassembled around her. And where and how that immediate problem is going to work itself out, we have no idea.

No wonder I drink. Good damn thing we'll be down at the Wedge again this evening.