Making our own reality (i.e., deciding whether to be happy)

My Mom, thank goodness, is not dying or, more accurately given her advanced age, she’s not dying imminently.  The problem is that she thinks she’s dying.  She has a benign, but very unpleasant, heart condition.  Every time it acts up, and it acts up with increasing frequency as she ages, she panics.  The problems begin with the panic.  Her blood pressure skyrockets, her muscles spasm, and she becomes breathless.  These symptoms, not the underlying heart problem, repeatedly land her in the ER.

What I wonder is whether, one of these days, her response to the problem, rather than the problem itself, is going to bring everything to an abrupt end.  I’m very worried that she’s creating a self-fulfilling prophecy — “This is going to kill me.”  She’ll be the next iteration in that old, old joke about the epitaph on a hypochondriac’s tombstone:  “See, I told you I was sick.”

I know she’s going to die sooner, rather than later.  After all, she’s a very, very old woman.  Unless they discover the gift of immortality within a few weeks or months, she’s moving up on the list of people who have lived out their time on earth.  What frustrates me so deeply is that I can’t bring her to a type of peace that would probably lengthen her time on earth and, even if it didn’t prolong her life, that would make her remaining days more pleasant.

The only thing that calms her is my company, but I simply can’t devote my every waking minute to her.  As my brother-in-law says, I’m already burning the candle at three ends.

It’s also deeply depressing to spend time in my Mom’s company, because her world has narrowed so that she speaks only of her pain, misery, and fear, as well as stories of all the wrongs done her, wrongs that transcend her war experiences and that reach out to every phase of her life.  I’m so terribly sorry that this once bright, vibrant, cheerful woman is living in this personal Hell, and I, weakly, don’t have the fortitude to share it with her and help lighten her load for more than a few hours a day.

So I didn’t blog today because I spent a lot of time caring for a very sad person and being, in turn, very sad myself that I cannot break through the fear and depression and bring her some repose that isn’t entirely dependent on my presence.

Sorry to be such a drag today, but I’m pretty tired and that dims my light too.  I’ll decide to be happy tomorrow morning, and get back to all of you in fine fettle.