The Business of Busyness
by Scott Hardie on May 26, 2019
My mother has Alzheimer's and dementia. She'll be 80 in a few months. For the last decade or so, her partner Andy has been taking care of her, but he's 85 himself and not able to continue. Since last summer, I've been taking on more and more of the daily responsibilities of taking care of my mother's needs, financially and legally and medically. And holy hell is it time-consuming. I had heard that it gets like this but I really had no idea.
I spend about 80-90% of my free time taking care of my mother. I'll frequently stay up until 12-2am answering emails from Andy, sending requests to her caregivers at her assisted living facility, scheduling appointments and companions for her, filling out forms and legal paperwork, placing orders for various things that she needs, and blocking out time in my work calendar for time that I'll have to take off to be in the room with her various doctors when she sees them. I'm on a first-name basis with her caregivers and lawyers. I keep a constantly-changing list of her medications and specialist doctors. I have come to dread checking my inbox or glancing at my buzzing phone because it's going to be more demands on my time and attention.
With Kelly dealing with her own recent medical crisis (3 surgeries and 15 days in the hospital so far), and a stressful work project that has me working overtime to meet difficult deadlines, I have been stretched really damn thin. It's gotten to a point that I have never reached before in my life, where I'm just failing outright to get things done. I pass out at midnight, unable to finish tasks that need to happen that night, because I just can't do any more. I reached a point this past week where I just surrendered and said I'm going to get done whatever I can and not stress any more if some things fall by the wayside because I'm human and have limits.
I have no idea how parents do it. I couldn't imagine trying to juggle all of this with kids on top of it. And my mother doesn't even live with me; being physically and immediately responsible for her needs would be even harder.
I'm saying all of this to illustrate why I've been absent from Funeratic for nine months and counting. I have so far been able to keep up with making goos, and I'll answer messages and concert challenges when they come up, but I really haven't had anywhere near the amount of time that I'd like to have to work on this website and interact with people here and add new content and do any of the numerous projects that I still think about. Funeratic is still big in my heart, but it gets a tiny sliver of my time because that's all that I have been able to give lately. Like I said, I'm trying to set more realistic limits starting this past week (and I'm trying to push more of my mother's care onto her very expensive professional caregivers where it belongs), so maybe I'll be able to make time for the site, but I certainly can't promise that.
Thanks for continuing to stick around. I'm not done with Funeratic.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
The Tiger
This is the second of four weekly blog posts about diagnoses that have completely changed my life since the pandemic started, after The Dragon. Last week, I wrote about my liver disease, which doesn't have any direct, detectable signs. It's not as if I feel any pain in my liver, or that I can sense that it's not working in the same way that I could tell right away if, say, my eyes stopped working or my lungs stopped working. Go »Buying a Printer
I bet if you work in a grocery store, you spend part of the time rearranging food that you know is going to get thrown away after it doesn't sell, so you feel like you're going to a lot of trouble for nothing. That's what buying a printer feels like. I hate buying printers because I'm highly skeptical that I can find one that will still work after six months, after Kelly and I have gone through a long series of them for the last ten years that all broke down like flimsy pieces of crap. Go »Week from Hell
It's my first week as manager, but there's no time for a honeymoon. On Monday, I got zero sleep the night before, and ran on fumes the whole day. Tuesday was spent almost entirely managing a single project and letting other fires burn. Go »It's All About Me
I regret if my rantings around this site have come across either whiny, as I coped with illnesses and a busy schedule, or hypocritical, as I griped about Christmas cheer while still participating in the holiday. I don't regret if they came across as self-centered. Go »Stepson
She hasn't come out and told me yet, but it seems pretty clear that my mom is engaged, or at least planning to get married to her boyfriend. I wish them both happiness, especially my mom after eleven solitary years as a widow. This is great news for both of them! Go »
