I’m going to start right off with the photos and the week and please, feel free to skip the rest of this post after this paragraph because it’s long, pretty dark and somewhat depressing. That’s just life, though, the week was okay. On Sunday I had coffee with a friend at Sleeper Coffee downtown and the bubble guys were out doing their thing, which is one of the things I love very much about this town. Monday, I was in an all staff meeting most of the day: inservice! I learned a lot about retirement (it’s hopeless) and sexual harassment (it’s bad and must be reported) and did this drawing. And, I suspect, caught the illness I’m currently enduring. Tuesday, I stopped by to take some good camera photos of the white pelicans on my way home from the dog walk. Wednesday, my daughter and granddaughter and I all went to the beach for sunset and I’m so glad we did. Thursday, I had therapy only to find out afterwards that my therapist is moving on. Bummer. I hope I can follow her but insurance may not allow this, so I went to the tiki bar and had a Purple Orchid, which is my favorite of all their amazing drinks. Friday, I woke up with whatever the hell is wrong with me and left work early. Five came over and put up these Halloween window clings, note the actual spider to the left. And yesterday I managed to wander around Fred Meyer in a daze (masked; I’m not history’s greatest monster) and then take poor Harvey for a short walk in the usual place. Other than that I have mostly been lying on the couch watching Alone and feeling sorry for myself.

I am sick. I thought it was a cold and now I think it might be covid (again, and again, and again in this cursed timeline) or maybe it’s a virus and actually, it doesn’t matter much really what it is. I’m not even going to talk about it much. I was going to make this whole blog post about food, because I’m feeling put upon doing all the cooking* and the endless round of grocery shopping and putting the groceries away and menu planning and so on and so forth but I realized that actually, this is not about food, it’s about caregiving.

I haven’t written much about this because I got enough flack from my family in the first incarnation of my blog for daring to write about them. I have tried, this time around, to be a bit more mindful even though I would like to point out that a) basically maybe three people read this blog and one of them is future me, trying to remember, and b) give it up, we live in the panopticon and you, too, blood relative, are observed. I have been planning for years to write revenge memoirs eventually, when everyone is dead, but at this point let’s face it: most everyone is already dead and the ones who aren’t will probably outlive me.

And one is dying very slowly in my garage. That would be my much older brother. He has dementia and a host of other physical ailments but we are terribly strong in this family and what would kill normal people does not, cruelly, kill us. He has had a long and storied life that has included (along with 35 years at sea in the merchant marine or, for a little while in the 70s, smuggling drugs around the Mediterranean in a freighter owned by a bunch of rich hippies) since he was in his late teens, what everyone always said was bipolar but which I think now was probably schizophrenia. Or bipolar with schizoaffective disorder: whatever. My parents did not before they died warn me that this was what I was walking into. They held that he was charmingly eccentric. Or less charmingly, during the multiple times that he was banned from the family and there was no contact, because he was also an alcoholic, like my dad, and they did not get along. Oh yes, mom and dad, it’s charmingly eccentric to type out endless pages of letters in mostly all caps describing conspiracy theories that circle around and around and around. Even if they are pretty well written. We are smart, this family. Word smart. Crazy, strong, and word smart. It’s a fucking LOT. But to be fair, back then did they know what we know now about mental illness? They did not. We know more. And YET, and YET, even in this year of the devil 2026 can anyone get a damn diagnosis? And treatment and help? No, no, they cannot. We can all pretend that help exists but you know, it doesn’t really, unless you get extraordinarily lucky and we are many things, this family, but lucky ain’t one. I mean there is some help. There are drugs, and he is on one, which is good, even if it just keeps some of the hallucinations at bay, and there was therapy, which, well, is sometimes good and sometimes useless but if you have SPMI (Severe and Persistent Mental Illness) which has turned into dementia, it does nothing and good luck.

Anyhow and anyway, he has had a hell of a rough time of it in his life and even though he’s been, over and over, a complete asshole to me, I decided that I would take care of him. He took care of our aunt, mostly, until he had a full psychotic break and I had to have him committed and put my aunt into memory care in the same damn month, hello unaddressed decade old trauma. But he did a good job before that, and what with Dad and all that (more trauma here, oh the circle goes on and on) I felt he deserved some help for a change and so I moved him here to Astoria. I said I would never let him move in with me, but instead help him out in his own apartment. That lasted a year and then he moved in. It has now been a little over a year since that dark day and honestly? Given a time machine I would not make any of these decisions – and the worst of it is that pretty much everyone warned me. But I did it anyway and here I am, and here he is, and some days are harder than others but no days are easy. Yesterday was a particularly bad day and I texted my other brother that I was cleaning shit off the floor in a house covered with spiders. He texted me back a picture of the cover of The Rector’s Daughter by E. M. Mayor which is apparently supposed to be the bleakest ever Victorian novel.

And then I had to google how to humanely euthanize an aquarium fish which sent me into full on hysteria. It’s good to fall over laughing. No, really. RIP Pinkie, who is now in a plastic bag on the bathroom floor next to the rolling pin because humane euthanization requires clove oil and I was unable to source some in a timely fashion. Jesus my life.

My brother is now on palliative care, which mostly means that he doesn’t have to leave the house. It means that vaccinations are over and medications are supposed to be for comfort and pain relief only, although he’s still taking some that are for his heart because otherwise the doctor who lives in his head will be mean to him. Don’t ask. Anyway, it’s good that he doesn’t have to leave, because his mobility is now severely limited and he has fallen twice. We have a wonderful lady who comes in every weekday morning for a couple of hours and he allows her to do the things that he mercifully will mostly not allow me to do. Eventually he will qualify for hospice and then he will get more help, which will be, uh, helpful. He is now third on the waiting list for memory care: there is one, exactly one, memory care facility in this entire county. I have no idea how we are going to pay for that, since his money is quickly running out and medicare does not cover memory care. Of course it doesn’t. If only someone had been able to predict that the baby boomers might get old and sick one day! But no! It is apparently a complete shock and no planning was done! By the way, I know that medicaid will cover that but I also know that he is unlikely to qualify and, just to end this on a really dark note, when the medicaid cuts come through in 2027, he’s really not going to qualify and neither is anyone else. Nursing homes and assisted living and skilled nursing and memory cares and all the rest of the awful patchwork of half assed attempts at humanely helping** seniors in the USA all run on medicaid. The fallout from this is not going to be pretty.

* even as I write this I have to pause it to go feed the bluejay some peanuts. I feed everyone.

** as opposed to humanely euthanizing. We treat animals better in this country sometimes: death with dignity is theoretically available in Oregon but not if you have dementia, even if you ask for it before you really have it. This is why I’m going stockpile clove oil and rolling pins for my own damn self.