The Busy Life…or, There and Back Again, COVID-19 Edition

So, one of the things I have to admit about me is that I have this innate need to digest experiences. The more impacting the experience, usually the longer it takes for me to talk about it. The same is true for decisions. If you want to know where to eat tonight, I’ve got a couple of ideas that I will throw out there. Want to know if we should buy that thousand-dollar thing we really need but is over our budget? I need time to think about that. (as my poor wife can attest, my opinions tend to be “no” if I’m pressed into a quick decision.)

I think that’s why I haven’t posted anything here in a while. The past month has definitely been…chocked full of experiences? Great stuff for future writing?

My mother and father are alive and well, but as my mother has gotten older, her dementia has moved from mild to moderate. If you imagine a scale with mild dementia on one side and severe dementia on the other, most of the scale is taken up by moderate dementia. My mother is definitely leaning more toward severe than mild, but it still has a ways to go before it is considered “severe.” At least, that has been the case for the last 6 months or so. And since my parents live in deep East Texas, there just weren’t enough resources to help them out. They need people who can watch over my Mom while my Dad shops for groceries, help with Mom’s care, and they need to have somebody around who, if my father injures himself, can be called upon to help out. If my dad said to get the phone, Mom wouldn’t know where the cellphone is or how to use it. On the way to the phone, she may forget what she was doing. That’s not hyperbole. That’s dementia.

Fortunately, they lucked out and found a place next to my brother, who is a doctor, and his wife, who is a sociologist and has helped the elderly as well as people with schizophrenia. The problem is that my brother and his family live in Washington state, several thousand miles away from Mom and Dad. So for much of May and June I have been helping out with their move. My family drove up with them to Washington a couple of weeks ago. It was a daunting task over a lot of highway. We got there in four days, driving through Kansas, Wyoming, and even Utah. (I’ve now been in every state in the “lower 48” except for Delaware.)

We drove the long road back to Houston, stopping to visit Shoshone Falls and Arches National Park. For the past few weeks, we’ve just been getting back into the swing of things. There are items to put away, books to read (Smoke From This Alter by Louis L’Amour), school choices to be made, and things to do.

I don’t have much to update on them or anyone else. This isn’t some grand post. The last three months have been very eventful. I will chew over them in the coming weeks, months, and years. Right now there is just a lot going on. To steal again from Tolkien, I’m a little fellow in a big world, and thank goodness. In the midst of this big chaotic world, though, I have a family I love and that loves me back, and that is all anyone ever needs, really.