I have a great family friend who has been on chemo forever; and it seems she will be on it forever; they give her no time parameters, and have left it up in the air whether she survives at all. She lives alone, and doesnt really have family to rely on, as her mother is in a nursing home, her brother has multiple bad medical problems, and one her other brothers is mentally challenged. Her young sister fled the coup long ago and lives in Washington State. So at the very least I would like to try and assist her thru this nightmare; but she doesn't seem to particularly thrilled with my visiting her, and I don't think its because of the COVID virus, though obviously she is immuno-comprimised; she does have health challenges that are particularly dangerous when further challenged with viral pathogen...

My mother just passed away in September with metastatic lung CA; she already had vascular dementia, so in some ways this was a blessing in disguise, as I did not want to be in the room when she first stated she did not know who I was--I dreaded this moment like the plague. It never happened because she died of the cancer before total dementia hit. I was her caretaker 24/7 for 12 years; I am in very bad financial shape right now; hopefully I will see light at the end of the tunnel before I too croak(I am 61).

My first girlfriend in 18 years, who was 20 years younger than myself (which considering my level of social development is probably too old for me), and just about totally blind, broke up with me after about 6 months of dating, which is probably longer than could have been reasonably expected, considering we had very little in common, she live 60 miles away, can't drive, and she complained about not being able to see me enough. I suppose I should be grateful that she ever went out with me in the first place; she is somebody I love regardless of any relationship, a sunny light in the world who overcomes her disability and shines light into most who come her way. I love her so much; there is not adequate words to express the heartbreak, because it is more like a heart shred. I didn't want to become friends with her, because even though obviously I am too old for her, seeing her date other men while I am alone and lonely, would just be too painful at this point. Why pick at old wounds? And I have always been one who takes at least a year to get over somebody I truly loved, so I am not going to be dating seriously right after a big break-up.

Just a couple of days ago, my best friend of 45 years, who used to be my girlfriend in my early 20s, basically told me after I made overtures to her, that she could never love me or anyone else because she doesn't love herself. She was abused in childhood; she has had horrible luck with men; she too spent a goodly portion of adulthood helping her ailing mother who recently passed away; she has a rather dysfunctional family; she works constantly, and until corona virus came, she was virtually busy 7 days a week. I love this woman with all my heart and all my soul, and when I asked her to give me back my promise ring I gave her 7 years ago (one of those loose packs where if we meet no other indispensable winners we decide we might marry), she stormed over and dropped it behind the glass storm door, mean-mugging like Trump at his most dismissive, refusing to talk to me as she retreated toward her car in an endlessly scornful loop of "I don't want to talk to you" "I don't want to talk to you". Little did she know what I had to say; little did she know I wanted not only to welcome her violence, but offer myself in sacrifice to appeasing it. I wanted to show her that she was worth taking any amount of abuse for; that I was willing to go to any length to please her, because of two reasons: You simply have to expect the abused to be abusers; you simply have to be willing, whether its blacks or woman or the raped or the tortured to realize within a certain subset of these populations, the continual desire of revenge for all the wrongs perpetrated. You have to be willing to sacrifice some dignity to let them know that you not only are sympathetic, but you would be similar if you had endured what they had endured. They hate you because you love them and they hate themselves--sympathy and empathy let them know you are willing to entertain the abuse not because of mashochism, but because you think they are worth suffering for, as all people who are worth something to you are worth suffering for...

This is of course from a moral perspective; practically carried-out is a hell of a lot thornier. Everything carried-out is a lot thornier.

I need to leave where I am currently living; obviously the pandemic has precluded that possibility for the forseeable future, and everyone says you can't run away from your problems, although living in a red state meant very little help to take care of my mother. In fact, the local CICOA branch which supplied a woman to watch my mother a couple times a week for a few hours, has such a great rate of turnover with their workers, they didn't know that thru a lawyer and gifting I was eligible to actually get paid to take care of mom. By the time I found out that program had been going on for 5 years, and when she finally got Medicaid thru the lawyer, she died. So she was out about 3500 for nothing. I have to say I am disappointed in a place, that refuses to admit that words about families coming first, does not replace actual action to help families; and God knows, you don't want to leave taking care of the elderly to nursing homes or even homecare (expensive)...I think if they want to stay in the home and be taken care of by family, you should provide some financial incentives to be able to do this, otherwise the family values bullshit is just another hot air dispenser of lofty words and precious little action.

I am in dire straits financially because of this; the other reason being mom never wanted to sue my father for never paying alimony, though he was a hell of a lot better than some in the 70s, because he did pay child support. But what she lost there was a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the many years she received no alimony, and she emphatically stated multiple times she didn't want to sue my father . So now in the middle of a crisis, I have 15,000 left in the bank (not that much), nobody else to rely on, a left rotator cuff injury that has been exacerbated by falling in the street, a neighborhood where I don't really know anyone anymore (the financial crisis of a previous decade wiped out those who weren't wiped out by disease, death or fear of crime), and an economy and nation collapsing like an imploding building while the top-floor parties like its 2099. And I feel fairly lucky...

Nobody in America is ever very well prepared for death, and I worked in hospitals for many years. The youth culture, the brand new, the fact that newer machines can perform tasks much more efficiently than old machines (though their durability is often not superior), the fact that many still die in hospitals instead of hospice or home, and the really important factor that in an advanced society people expect the elderly to be very costly gobbling up healthcare and social security dollars, makes this a youth-oriented culture, in terms of the zeitgeist and social pronouncements. Of course, given the fact that we want eternal youth in our adults, and eternal adulthood in our youths (ever hear some of the pop pitched to 10 year olds?).

I don't claim my youth was a joyous romp thru health and exploration--I had a suicide attempt (hanging), got into mild drugs and then prescription drugs (pain meds for shoulder; headache pills), and meandered around for quite a bit before finding healthcare. Few girlfriends and great loneliness, and a tendency to alienate others with moody behavior and grand gestures attempting to balance it all out. I may have even scared the shit out of a few people with some lurid poems, and some extremely graphic letters that were done to scare people who had hurt me. One wonderful effect of having a less than ideal young adulthood, as that as you age, you are not looking into rose-colored mirrors at the glorious past behind you, regretting the sweet dew of lost youth and the nirvana that the young are supposedly perpetually in--you know it wasn't that way for you, and probably not for everybody else. So theoretically you should age more gracefully than eternal adolescents (which some have accused me of being, probably because the unpopular and unmarried just aren't as jaded as some, and because there is some regression and social retardation in those who have been sheltered by parents to a great extent; I am the original oedipal wreck).

I don't do these exercises of lurid lament, because I want to glory in past sins or seek undue sympathy or stoke the black winds of self-termination; I am doing them like writing peoples names on papers you burn in fires, to finally free yourselves of them symbolically. I am freeing myself-hopefully- of self-destruction, and if in the course of my freeing myself, I end up ruminating into self-fulfilling- prophecy-destruction...Well life is chock full of such delicious ironies.