There are a hundred reasons why not to holiday abroad with David freezing and lurching as he does. An unwelcome stowaway, Parkinsons finds a way to show up wherever we travel. Guaranteed. So he’s not reported INBBRIATED. Unfit to travel, a constant fear of mine I...
Moan, moan, moan. YOU’RE NOT ALONE, friends soothe. It doesn’t help, you know — telling me. I know friends mean well offering pop-in help and I am grateful, truly, but fact is David and I are adrift alone in a sea of day to day survival. Try a caregiver’s life for...
Up. Up and away… not in a balloon, though that would be fun, but in a chair lift scaling a precipitous mountain in the French Alps. Lake Benit lay hidden in a crater out of reach to David and me. We’d called ahead to find out if the chair lift would take somebody so...
Anybody home? It’s lonely here outside your world. I trace your profile with my gaze, the familiar silhouette on the pillow beside me for more than thirty years. One room, two chairs we sit together of an evening in the rumble of television’s tunnel journeying ever...
“My civil rights are being invaded.” His words. His custodian, duty demands I, his wife and caregiver, keep him off society’s scrap heap. Fight on his behalf. Protect. Defend. I learned how at age six in the land of my birth, India. My loving Ayah disappeared. My...
I don’t recall when Parkinsons shape-shifted husband to patient, wife to caregiver. Was it the day he held up his underpants, asked, “What do I do with these…?” The day I re-taught him how to stand from sitting, use the TV remote, or the day I first wiped dignity from...
To better get what the hell it is I’m sounding off about, I’ll set the scene from fifteen year’s ago before the Parkinsonian sea engulfed us, before my husband declared himself trapped alive inside a sinking wreck. I glanced up. Sitting in our living room, the...
I have never written a blog. Don’t quite know what a blog is. The one blog I have read was part of a novel. As far as I can tell blogs are rants. Mental diarrhea spilled on a page for strangers. So, fellow caregivers wearing a hat from hell, do you talk of ending it...