Promoted by Steven D. Please read this wonderful essay on family, love, life and — politics. One of the best ones I’ve seen lately at showing how all politics truly is personal, and why progressive values are important to our country.
When my dog, Missy, was alive, she had the reputation of “Stealth Woo” with all who knew her. “Woo” is, of course, simply a play on the primary vocalization of the Malamute breed. And Missy vocalized a lot. She was very opinionated, with a innate drive to ensure that she was listened to and taken seriously. She was also very clever, a bit sneaky when she wanted to be and she could move through the house like a ghost.
She loved it. It was, for her, the ultimate game.
After she died, her absence was tangible. It felt almost like an empty echo chamber, until her ashes were returned to us and set up on a small sanctuary that my wife had prepared in her honor. Although the ashes were small consolation for the loss of her great fuzzy hearted presence, we nonetheless found comfort in the modified presence to which she’d been restored to our lives. We reminisced about her humor, her games, her attitude and her appetite. We didn’t, therefore, think it was amusing when the bag containing her ashes vanished from the box which held them.
It was Thursday morning when I noticed that something had changed. I came downstairs to the kitchen to get the morning routine started, and thought it odd that I didn’t “feel” Missy’s presence as I passed by her little sanctuary. I figured that I was just tired, and put it out of my mind.
Then, at around two-thirty yesterday (Friday) afternoon, I noticed my mother-in-law over by the sanctuary, rummaging through a few things I’d collected for research. As I looked over to moniter her activity (she has mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, and we care for her at home), I froze. The death certificate (which was enclosed with a copy of the “Rainbow Bridge”) was missing from atop the little cedar box that held Missy’s ashes.
I flew into a flurry of desperate searching, trying to see where Mumsie might have moved the small envelope and card to. Then I noticed the box. It wasn’t fully shut and latched anymore.
The card was inside, along with the treat we’d placed there and a tuft of Missy’s fur. But the ashes were gone.
New flurry of activity, along with a sweeping dread and an anger that sprang from several sources: anger that I’d not been able to keep my dog safe, something that should not have been a challenge as she was dead and therefore very low maintenance; anger at not having noticed that the ashes had been disturbed before that point; anger at not catching Mumsie in the act of removing or transporting the ashes; anger at my wife for not catching Mumsie if this had all happened on “her watch”…and anger directed not at Mumsie, but at the disease that was slowly claiming her memories, her motor skills, her cognitive ability and her life.
Mumsie was upset when she realized that she had likely been the one who’d moved the ashes. And she was more upset because she knows, deep inside, that these type of things have been happening but she can’t remember why, nor can she slow them down or stop them.
I had to stop my steady yet frantic searching; Mumsie was my current responsibility, and I’d upset her. I work out of the house, so I’ve been her primary caretaker while Wifey worked about 20 minutes away. I called Wifey, told her what had happened, and verified that she would be back on time so that we could search and take turns keeping Mumsie from further upset.
When Wifey got home, the first place she went to check was Mumsie’s room. My mother-in-law had shared a special bond with Missy. They both had hip problems, and would lurch and wobble like synchronized dancers whenever we’d go for a walk. Missy knew that Mumsie was her human counterpart — the eldest matriarch of the house, and fragile. She took care of her as best she could, watching out for her and letting my wife and I know if anything was amiss. Mumsie knew this, and it touched her heart as much as it did ours.
Not long after Wifey began her search, she found Missy’s ashes, wrapped up still safe and sound, hidden in a laundry basket of clothes tucked under a spare bed in Mumsie’s room. Our “Stealth Woo” had apparently been spirited away by Mumsie, only to be carefully ensconced in Mumsie’s room so they could be together once more.
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You may wonder what makes this a compelling story to relate on a political blog, when it is perhaps more suitable to a “slice of life” e-zine. Frankly, it’s the “slice of life” that makes it particularly suitable. As the saying goes, “and now for the rest of the story“:
Mumsie is an 83 year old Greek American, widowed early in life. My wife is her only child; her husband died over thirty years ago.
He was a veteran.
The Veteran’s Administration has an array of benefits for soldiers and their families that help to compensate them for the dedication and service they perform for the country. Ranging from education to healthcare to monetary remuneration and retirement pay, the combined benefits can be compelling for young families to enlist and remain in the service of their nation. It is, IMO, one of the factors that has played heavily in the success of our all-volunteer forces, and it also serves to help make some type of amends for those who forced into service through a draft.
Lately, vet benefits have been suffering under the Bush Regime, and a heavy-handed Republican majority in Congress.
For all their bluster and clamoring about patriotism and the importance of supporting the troops, cutting veteran’s benefits (either directly or by reducing the capacity of eligible recipients to claim them) is an ultimate betrayal.
My wife and I — and Mumsie, in particular — have been fortunate. The benefits she qualifies for have not been cut or reduced. She meets the necessary criteria for additional benefits that my wife is applying for on her behalf, which enables us to maintain a high level of quality care.
I’ve had experience with dementia patients before, having helped with several studies on new therapies as well as having performed voluntary patient transportation services. The nature of my work as a consultant and a writer permits me a tremendous flexibility; much of what I do can be done remotely over the internet or via a VPN connection. Up until late last year, I was able to help Mumsie coordinate her daily outfits to match my casual business wear, and I would bring her with me when I had to go to clients or other meetings, or when I had to go do research or interviews. I can still occassionally do that, but I’m just now beginning to take back on more work. I had to cut back to only three days per month, when I knew Wifey could coordinate her work schedule to help her manage Mumsie in my absence, after Mumsie began to enter a phase of her dementia that required constant monitoring.
Fortunately, the state has benefits that Mumsie qualified for. We were able to enroll her recently in an adult day-care program that frees up my time for six hours per day, four days per week. The Veteran benefits we’ve just learned about, and that Mumsie qualifies for, will add a fifth day, plus help ensure that Mumsie’s costly medications are more affordable and that some of the homecare functions I’m currently responsible can be performed by an outside agency; essentially, I’ve been able to partially outsource myself.
I still manage Mumsie in the early mornings, in the mid-afternoons and evenings, as well as weekends whenever Wifey doesn’t have a day off. The state and Vet programs don’t cover everything, 24/7, unless we put her in an assisted living facility. She’s not at the point where we feel that’s justified. It’s not easy — but we’re managing.
We still have the occassional “slice of life” vignettes occurring, where Mumsie will move (like a “Stealth Woo”) and rummage through critical items while we’re in the bathroom, shower or bringing up laundry. We don’t leave her alone, but we don’t tie her down to chairs, either. Generally, as a parent can somewhat keep track of their children in a house, we can be in the next room and have an idea of whether Mumsie is “up to” anything. We don’t let her “do stairs” unattended. Sometimes, she doesn’t recognize that she’s in her home of 35+ years, and she’ll try to let herself out to go “walk home” — try jumping into the shower, hearing the door open downstairs, and having to dress while running to intercept a stubborn 83 year old before she turns the corner and starts hoofing it for the children’s school bus stop. It’s not fun, tho it is quite the adventure at times. (This morning, when I let our little dog in to go wake her up, and then followed through the door of her room, she jumped out from behind the door and yelled “BOO!” with a big smile on her face.)
For my wife and I, it is important that we are able to care for her mom at home as long as possible. We are unique, and extremely fortunate, that we can do this at this time, and have been able to manage this way for a little over three years now. Mumsie comes out with at night if we have special places to go (she met Markos and Jerome in Boston when they came through the other week), and we don’t keep her out long. It is the benefits of the social care programs, coupled with the veteran’s benefits, that make this possible and help hold down the direct costs. We still pay pretty high indirect costs — through accidental damages and loss (sometimes Mumsie finds old photos, or new bills, or special certificates that she can’t identify, and she shreds them as “skata” (sh!t); we don’t always realize it because she hides the evidence just in case she was wrong to do it). We also pay a price in the loss of my paid work, and some of my creative writing; the slice of life that opened this piece is just one example of the type of insanity that can permeate the house. It makes it difficult to find time to concentrate on complex pieces like the Danse Macabre series I’ve been working on. I’ve got nearly the entire series complete in my head, but every time I’ve sat to compose, the flow from mind to finger to keyboard is interrupted by a crash, tear, “uh-oh”, opening door or a series of repeated questions. Those are costly losses of concentration; we’ve been working on ways to help restructure my writing times so that I can have that necessary “quiet time”. Those are challenges we face that we can overcome. And they serve to strengthen our commitment to taking care of Mumsie as long as it’s benefitting her, as long as we can manage.
But that’s all tenuously tied to the programs that exist in our national and state infrastructure. The programs that the Republican majority, and the Bush Administration’s neoconservative minions in particular, seek to destroy.
Not long before our nation took the first steps toward liberty and independence, the freedoms we hold dear were diminishing at an alarming rate. The DailyKos diary Founding Father Franklin Schools Us On Leaking by mrcoder elaborates a little bit on that, with some great historical references. On October 28, 1886, France gave the United States the Statue of Liberty (the “non-national monument”); the sonnet “The New Colossus” was composed by Emma Lazarus in 1883, but it wasn’t until the early 1900’s that a bronze plaque bearing the sonnet was affixed to the inner walls of the statue’s pedastal. The sonnet and the plaque has come to symbolize the statue’s universal message of hope and freedom for immigrants coming to America and people seeking freedom around the world.
Just as my beautiful departed Missy has managed to vanish one more time, so too have our liberties been diminished yet again by a tyrannical George.
Just as my mother-in-laws Veteran benefits are intact, but not necessarily so for so many other veterans, so too are the freedoms and liberties of many Americans, as the NSA wiretapping and warrantless siezures have continued.
Let us not fail to recall our lessons of history, as mrcoder reminded us with the Franklin diary, and let us not fall into the complacency where we permit those who have served with honor and distinction to be compromised now that most of those who remember their service have passed on, or forgotten.
We must maintain our right to our rights and freedoms, our rights to the founding principles and tenets of our nation’s Constitution, and we must insist on our leadership recalling — not ignoring — the history of this nation, lest the symbols of our freedom disappear one by one, until finally the great Lady Liberty vanishes, and with her, our pursuit of happiness.
