The visit with my mother did not go well. They so rarely do but this was on the horrible scale.
There are so many reasons. Some of them obvious- she is still in a lot of pain. She is miserable. She is at the end of a life that has held a great deal of sorrow and pain and there has been no redemption at all and no reward for any of the tribulations she's been through and in fact, it would almost seem that she is now being punished, or at least that is how it seems to her and she is angry about all of it.

The litany of complaints is repeated over and over again. Word-for-word and I realize this is part of dementia but it all makes me feel as if I am expected to do something, anything, to make it better and there is absolutely nothing I can do. She is now telling me stories about my biological father that I've never heard from before I was born and they add another layer of suffering to the whole story of her life.
"Why didn't you leave him?" I asked her today after one of these stories of drunkenness and betrayal.
"I loved him," she said.

Well.

There are so many complaints, new horrors, the old ones, there is nothing positive whatsoever. After an hour and a half I had to leave. I tried to help her eat a little but she doesn't want to eat and she says she's nauseous all the time and I'm sure she is. They are going to try and change her pain medication to a patch to see if that will help. Her oxygen was low today and they had her on a nasal cannula and the machine sounded like a human being snoring.
It was the most comforting thing in the room.

I feel completely beat-down. I am exhausted. I am angered at myself for letting all of this affect me so much, not to mention the way it affects my conversations with my children, my husband. I take full responsibility for allowing her to affect me this way. It does not make me like myself in the least.

That's it. That's all I have to say tonight. I know that tomorrow will be another day and these feelings will fade and other feelings will take their place as they do. This is the way of it. And feelings are merely feelings, etc. And so forth.

I feel like shit. But I know I am not.