A letter to my family

Today was the second hardest day of my life.  The first was the day my daughter was diagnosed with cancer.  Today I put my mom in a skilled nursing facility.  It has been a 9 year process getting to this point.  I wrote about that already.  And yes, I know it is the right choice, the safe choice, the best choice, the healthiest choice.  But that doesn't make it easier.  And I could not have accomplished this without you.  So this is a thank you letter to the two of you.

To my sisters, Nancy and Mary Beth, THANK YOU:

• For making it so hard to talk to either one of you about Mom and Bill's care eight years ago when they lived in central Florida and we moved them to independent living
• For not helping us provide a consolidated front for their care and well-being
• For being totally unaware of their financial straits and defaults on car and home loans, and for leaving all those legal matters up to us
• For turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to our pleas for help and support
• For not realizing in 2012 I was suffering from clinical depression and had to be hospitalized for 10 days due to the stress, and for adding to that stress by undoing all our hard work we had done to set the stage for Mom and Bill's eventual transfer to assisted living and fully paid eldercare, and then...
• For sabotaging our efforts by moving them out of independent living up to Nashville TN, instead of convincing them to stay
• For having them incur even more debt by driving them to buy a car
• For constantly complaining about how hard it was to have Mom and Bill in Nashville
• For complaining about each other to Dad and Sheila every chance you had, for putting each other down, and saying hateful things about each other
• For being unfeeling and cold during Bill's memorial service and not acting like a family
• For not caring enough to realize Mom's financial predicament of being nearly $11,000 in debt to her residence, and for offering ZERO constructive suggestions for care
• For being cold and mean and dare I say, bitchy and self centered, when we tried to meet and discuss things
• For not bothering to help with finances or logistics of moving her belongings four times, and for insisting we drive 6 hours each way in one day because Mom's belongings in your house were "stressing you out"
• For totally ignoring repeated letters outlining options, the situation, and requests for help, and then replying with acid-tongued text or emails
• For not offering to help move an 88 year old mom nearly 300 miles, but leaving it up to us
• For not having the common courtesy to check in with us routinely to see how it was going, or if we needed anything
• For asking if we had cable because "Mom loves HGTV" but when I asked for help to pay for it, crickets
• For constantly bringing up the past, and getting irrationally upset on phone calls, only to hang up or to harangue me so much that I had to hang up
• For not providing any financial or even emotional support during the transition
• For accusing me of convincing Mom to have unnecessary surgery when her hernia was about to rupture and was causing problems with her ostomy
• For getting me to listen to you badmouth each other
• For not understanding what Mom has been going through for the past nine years, and not caring enough about them to see the signs of an elderly couple needing more help than they would admit
• For accusing me of exaggerating Mom's health and mental state
• For allowing us to absorb nearly $7,000 of extra expense to get Mom here
• For not coming to help when we had a triple crisis of both of Alex's parents in the hospital in Florida, and Mom in the hospital here
• For telling me I always control things and make the wrong decisions and don't give you voice, even though you only have that voice after all the decisions have been made
• For offering no respite or relief, not even emotional
• For calling Mom at the hospital when she was sick with heart arrhythmias and high blood pressure and a concussion and telling her what I asked you not to tell
• For being completely and blissfully ignorant of all the paperwork and steps we have to take to make sure Mom's health and welfare are taken care of, including paying her bills and selling her car
• For focusing on yourselves, not what was best for our mother

For all of these things, I thank you, because it made me realize how much I need God, how I can rely only on Him, not on you.  Without you, my faith would not have grown, and I would not have felt His warm embrace. Without you, I couldn't have done it. Or appreciated His grace

Lamentations 3:25-26  The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,  to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord