A Multitude of Things Where do I start? My mother drives me nuts! I know your mother drives you nuts too.

Yesterday, I got this chatty four page letter from her in which she casually mentioned that my 86 year old father is now in hospice care. The problem is that I do not know how to react to that. I have no idea if it true.

I don’t know why it is true or not because for as long as I can remember, my mother has been dying. I remember coming home from elementary school and her telling me that she was not going to live that much longer. She told me that she had some disease that she was not going to tell her doctor about because she wanted to die anyway. I remember her calling me in college (in the late 1980’s) to tell me that she probably only had a short time left. Why was she dying? “Oh a multitude of things,” she would say.

For the past ten or twelve years I would occasionally get the “your father is dying” call. Why was my father dying? Again she would say it was a multitude of things. Then I would rush home to find my father essentially unchanged from the last visit.


Is my father getting hospice care? Maybe? Will my mother tell me the truth? You got me.

Today I am grateful for:

• Alcoholics Anonymous
• I have been mothered by a number of wonderful women in the program
• My life today

  ¶ 5/22/2007 04:14:00 AM