Guilt

 I'll not be going to the protests today.  My mother is still in the hospital.  Everything works slowly.  They moved her to a new room.  It is not better than the old one.  It is by the nurses desk and is noisy, but my mother cannot hear, so. . . .  When I went to see her in the morning, she was miserable, sitting in a chair trying to eat, but she couldn't.  She'd been throwing up.  After a few minutes, she lay down in the bed and went to sleep.  I stayed and watched her, then said I would come back later.  And I did.  And once again, she was asleep.  I sat for over an hour, but she didn't move.  She had been narcotized.  Her conditions are conundrums, really.  She takes pain meds to alleviate her suffering, but pain meds constipate her.  She is very constipated.  But the opioids also make her nauseous, so they give her anti-nausea medicine.  She has a new doc in charge of her now, and he has called in a specialist, but first they must do an MRI.  And here's the weird part--they do scheduled MRIs and walk-ins during the day and hospital patients at night.  When I went back a third time around five, my mother was up and sitting in a chair.  Not long after, dinner came--fried chicken tenders, mashed potatoes with gravy, broccoli, grapes, and some chicken soup the sweet diet lady had thrown in for my mother in case she couldn't eat the other.  My mother nibbled at the chicken, ate a couple spoonfuls of mashed potatoes, and managed about 3/4s of the broccoli.  She ate one grape.  

"That should clog her up nicely," I thought.  

I couldn't believe they didn't have her on a drip to hydrate her.  I couldn't believe they had not given her an enema.  

The nurse came in.  She was nice.  She had called me earlier in the day to give me an update on my mother.  She said that my mother would not be going for her MRI until sometime that night.  She apologized.  

"What else is she going to do?" I asked, and the nurse laughed.  

My mother scrolled on her phone as I sat there.  Conversation was difficult, of course, because she can't hear what I say.  I have to say it all again at a much great volume.  

"I need a phone charger," she said.  

"Do you want me to see if they have one here?"

I went to the nurses desk and asked.  I could tell it was an unusual request, but the lady was nice and looked for one.  I went back and got my mother's phone and gave it to the lady at the desk.  

My mother couldn't figure out how to work the t.v., so I turned it on and gave her a mini lesson.   She sat looking at the television.  This was my third trip of the day.  It was getting dark, so I said I was going to go and get some dinner.  

"Don't go," she whined in voice that was faux but truly sincere. 

"O.K." I said and sat down.  

"No, no. . . go. . . you've got a life to live."

There was a lot of guilt giving in that.  

"What life?  I'm going home to eat.  It is Friday night.  I'll be doing what I always do."

I kissed her and asked her to call me after her MRI.  

I wasn't feeling well.  My nose had been running and I was tired and achey.  Perhaps I had picked up some illness in the hospital.  Just the place for it.  Most of the staff were wearing masks, so I thought maybe something was going around.  My MAGA Fauci hating friends always bring up masks.  "They don't work," they say.  

"Then why do all the doctors and nurses wear them?"

"They trap bacteria which are larger, but they don't stop viruses which are very much smaller."

"Which communicable diseases are caused by bacteria?" I ask.  Some variety of strep.  Not much else.  My MAGA friends are full of "viral" horseshit.  

But it is very possible that my illness was psychosomatic.  I tend to get whatever symptoms my mother suffers from.  If her feet swell, so do mine.  If she feels flu-ish, so do I.  My belly felt bloated just now.  Who knows.  

I went home and ate a can of garbanzo bean and lentil soup.  Fiber, I thought.  I followed up with a whiskey, then an apple.  I tried to find some news on my t.v. With the Israeli/Iran thing, I feel the need to get cable hooked back up.  I found ways to get the news of the day, but it was not contemporary.  Then I watched something I can't remember.  I was tired.  Worn out.  Before ten, I was getting ready for bed.  

It is June.  I've either been taking care of my mother or myself since January.  Half of 2025.  As I sit in the hospital rooms, I think of Ili coming to stay with me when I got run over.  We had not been together for months at the time, and what I didn't know then was she had a new boyfriend.  I think she was staying with him many if not most nights.  But she came and stayed day and night in my hospital rooms, sleeping on a cot, making sure I was o.k.  I think of the horrible tediousness of that now, of the boredom and exhaustion, and I feel very sad.  I think things went to shit when we went to Paris the following year.  I didn't realize it until we got home, but there was the expectation from many that I was going to propose to her there.  Maybe I should have.  The romance, you know, of it all.  But as usual, she was not a happy traveler much of the time, and she fought with me over the weirdest things.  It happened on every trip we took together, and there were many.  It was crazy, but thinking back, it wasn't that much different than our lives at home.  I've had very few arguments in my life with the people I have loved.  I hate to argue emotionally.  I love to debate without feeling, of course.  It has been the bread and butter of my life.  But nobody ever wins an emotional argument.  I believe now that those were Ili's bread and butter, a form of emotional manipulation.  It was hereditary I now believe, maybe not genetically so but part of the familial upbringing.  Still. . . I loved her enough to live with it, but I think the not proposing in Paris was something of a death nell.  For better or for worse.  

Sitting in the hospital so many days with my mother, I cannot get over Ili's concern and care and kindness and love.  So yea. . . it is something I will never get over.  

And it is a thing that guilts me every time I leave my mother's room to go home.  

There is a part of me that my mother's deteriorating conditions are dragging to the grave.  I'm just fucking worn out.  

"You have to take care of yourself, too," people say, but I am not so much like that.  I am more an empath than most people I know.  I'm emotional to a fault.  Things touch my heart far too deeply, and I believe that is why I pretend to be a rough and tough asshole.  I am not, though.  I've always liked pretend more than reality.  I pretend to be one of Teddy's Rough Riders.  

We all have our problems.  

So I head back to the hospital this morning.  I will sit there and listen to the tv westerns and the beeping of multiple machines, the chatter in the hallway.  I'll ask my mother things, twice always, maybe three times.  I will talk to her nurses and hopefully her doctor(s).  And when she is released, I will have to go live at her house once again.  All the traveling I had hoped to do once my leg was healed is now moot.  

And the house is still falling apart.  Most days now, I don't think I can keep doing it all alone.  I look at relationships and marriages I have no envy for whatsoever now and think, "Maybe they are happy?"  

In the end, maybe, nobody's time is their own.