Shaky Mary

Mary’s shaking scares me. I’m afraid she’ll eventually shake so much that she won’t be able to move. I could handle having to feed her and help her drink—although I don’t know if she could handle that. It’s the getting around bit that gets me. Let alone the fear of her not being able to get down the two stairs into the car. Oh, I know I know we can get a ramp if she can’t do the stairs anymore. At least that solves the problem of getting out of the house. It doesn’t solve the problem of getting in to other people’s houses.

But even her inability to get around in the house, even just a bit, is scary. Why? I guess I’m being selfish because I’m thinking of the drain on my energy that it will be. Maybe I need a break. I should just arrange all of this financially, so I’ll be out of this nebulous middle ground of sort of being unemployed and yet in reality working full-time for Mary. I did pay myself a bit last week. I not only feel incredibly guilty about it because Mary doesn’t know and I’m sure that’s illegal—but if I told her she would put up the biggest stink and tell me to put her in a home if I have to and that she doesn’t have the money to pay anyone. She does have the money, though. And my bank account was almost at zero. I’ve been putting everything I buy on my credit card for the last five months, so my minimum payment is sky high now. She has no idea. No idea of what she’s wordlessly demanding of me. And would she do it? Yes, what would she do if the roles were reversed?

I’m also afraid about paying myself because of the rest of the family. People get so weird about money. They become vultures. When Mary dies, they will come out of the woodwork to claim what is “rightfully” theirs. If Anna and Angie have passed away, their children will demand their portion and will want to know what I’ve been doing with Mary’s money—because let me tell you, there may not be much left, especially if she lives another ten years, which I think she could easily do. People who never even sent her a Christmas card or had her telephone number in their address books will be demanding a piece of the pie. It will be ugly. I have no doubt. I’ve seen it happen too many times. People who seem so loving and caring become monsters when someone in the family dies and they see a chance to gain a little. I don’t want to be sued. In the eyes of the law, I don’t doubt that I will be seen as someone trying to take advantage of Mary. It’s always that way. I don’t want to take advantage of Mary, but I don’t want her to take advantage of me either.

All of this because I was thinking of how shaky Mary has become. Hm. Well, money is often in the back of my mind. You can’t help it if you have bills due and your bank account is getting low.

Actually, another thing I hate about the shaking (It’s really jerking.) is the violence of it. She can’t control it. At first I laughed (sometimes I still do) because she would be going along and then all of a sudden, it was like a car whose engine starts to stall and she would go chug, chug, chug, then move on. She calls it dancing. It kills me to see her struggling to get out of a chair and unable because her limbs start flailing. I always tell her to breathe deeply and relax, because that seems to help. I know she gets tired of hearing that, and Lord knows, I get tired of saying it. She’s gotten so that she loses her fork almost every night because her hand jerks suddenly and it flies out of her grasp. It’s actually quite amazing what she can do with her left hand—her right hand being the shakier of the two. That’s part of the wonder of Mary—her flexibility. You know what? If I wonder aloud about something, she will often ask me if I can’t find out about it on the Internet! I’ve shown it to her a few times and when I tried to explain it to her, it really came home to me how much I don’t understand but just accept. She hasn’t lost that ability. A lot of older people just say, “Oh, I can’t understand that,” and give up. No, Mary isn’t a quitter.