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11:15pm January 25, 2015

My Great-Uncle Lindy :-(

Yesterday, I wrote a poem:
It talked about how my great=uncle Lindy was one of the people who taught me the traditional family value that when at all possible, family does not allow family to end up in nursing homes.  Even if that means, as Lindy did, moving in with your mother and caring for her for decades.
Yesterday, unbeknownst to me, my aunt and uncle put Lindy in a home.  He had gone for a walk at night without his dog and gotten completely disoriented, and he’s now living in a facility for people with memory issues.
It looks to me like a situation I have often feared happening in my family, including happening to me (which is why I have done a lot to set up care for myself that doesn’t involve either family or institutions).
That situation is:
  • Those who retain these values don’t have the physical or financial ability to put them into practice.
  • Those who have the physical or financial ability to put them into practice don’t retain these values strongly enough to actually do so, if they retain those values at all.
Which means the aging, disabled family member ends up living in a home.  It makes me want to cry.  Lindy is a great man, he loves animals, he always took in stray cats and dogs and got them food and medical care. 
I wish I still had an electronic copy (or any copy, really) of a photo of me with him taken by my mom in my early twenties, where we had the same crewcut, and nearly the same outfit (shirt, suspenders, pants), and the family resemblance made it all look uncanny.  There was a cat on my lap wearing a cone because of her recent eye surgery.
I never talked much to him, but I never felt I needed to.  Just being around each other was enough for both of us.  I felt like Mary Margaret Britton Yearwood’s poem about wild kittens:  

I see big cats race across the yard as my grandma talks in cat talk.

Cat talk sounds like this: Here kitty, kitty.

In cat talk, here kitty kitty means I love you.

I don’t see any wild kittens but I know they are there.

My boy told me so and my boy doesn’t lie about important things like kittens.

I am tired of sitting on the steps, so I hide under the house and sit in the cool black dirt.

I am a wild kitten.

My grandma can’t see me, but she knows that I am here.

That’s how I felt visiting Great-Grandma and Great-Uncle Lindy. I’d run around the backyard interacting with their cats (many feral or semi-feral), but they knew I was there and their love was enough.
I wish even more that someone could move into his house and take care of him the way he took care of his mom.  But he has no children, and all the people inclined to do this have no ability to do it, and all the people with the ability lack the inclination and the values.
Arrrgh.
Notes:
  1. vladdraculea said: I’m so sorry, Mel. This is heart-wrenching. ♡
  2. cimpedime reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  3. katisconfused said: when my grandma died her husband (who was only our relative by marriage) got shoved in a home by his kid :/ it was so sad because we WOULD have tried to keep him out of there but no blood relation so we couldn’t. He died soon after going in….
  4. withasmoothroundstone posted this