Fog. Rain. Drizzle. Cold. And sailboats. It's Sunday and what better way to ignore what I'm feeling than to go to the marinas and look at sailboats? At the first stop there were two Herons...huge birds, distrustful of me...nervously pacing and watching, ready to take flight into the fog at the first thought I might be stalking them.
Last night I got to Candice's house and after dinner I settled into sorting through a box of old photos, mom's jewelry and odds and ends from the nursing home. I find personal letters from her court appointed attorney, Sarah Malia, calling her "Betty Boop," and a birthday my mother never sent telling me everything Sarah and/or the doctors are saying about her are all lies. It's emotional. I can feel the panic in her letter, the fear, the knowing she's going to lose everything. The guardian and the courts are going to come in, take everything and sell it. And they did.
It's bad enough to lose a parent to dementia, but losing one to a court appointed attorney she tells me she does not trust, and that her best friend does not trust, is all the worse because it's after her death I'm reading these letters. What would I have done differently had I known?
I pick up her ashes tomorrow and I am feeling waves of grief. They come and go. Candice drives me around Knoxville and the University of Tennessee. The student union has been leveled, nothing is the same. Building are gone, memories are just that - since the buildings and places I knew so well in college are gone. There is no permanence. Photos, letters....everything changes. Everything.
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