By me.
A long time friend — a short black woman who always described herself, jokingly, as a “poor black child from Harlem,” asked me in… roughly… 1999, maybe 2000, to be her executor of her will — actually what she asked was to take care of her things if she died. She was too cheap and stupid to hire a lawyer to do a will. But oh God, I wish she had.
I had managed to get her a 3-page internet based will which she signed and had witnessed and notarized. The will basically said that all her money would be divided up and given to 3 charities. She was a very cheap and somewhat horrible person and she just kept saying, for years, that she didn’t want anyone spending her money and that she’d never rest if she knew someone had it. (She is money obsessed.)
Anyway, flash forward to 2025 and she just seems to be having one problem after another, and I was too blind or ignorant, maybe, to see that her dementia was advancing on her. She had just turned 88, when she had a fall on one of the coldest and iciest days of the year. That put her in the hospital where she needed surgery and she just kept saying, I just want to die. When I spoke to her on the phone she asked me why they couldn’t just give her some pills and I told her that’s not how hospitals work. After a week she agreed to have the pins put in her leg and then, this year long nightmare began. She was no longer able to walk and, physical therapy did not improve the problem.
Now the odd thing is that if she hadn’t had the surgery, the big “threat” was that she would never be able to walk again. So surgery or no surgery, she can’t walk. And she has dementia. And she has COPD — has had it since the time when they called it emphysema. And she has a large section of her left lung removed because she had tuberculosis as a child — she was in an iron lung for six months. And she has glaucoma. And she has no teeth.
I’m going to cut this memoir down to nothing and flash forward to yesterday. Almost 1 year and 2 weeks after her fall and the surgery. We had finally found a place for her to live out the rest of her years but, since personality doesn’t change, she has been nothing but uncooperative and vicious to all the people that are there to help her. The administrator of the center is going to tell me tomorrow that she has to be moved to their second floor, which is $7,500/month, or that we have to find a proper nursing home for her.
And I am so angry now. I am angry that I ever agreed to help this woman. She is ungrateful and spiteful. She gets combative for no discernible reason. She is racist — hates any Spanish speaking person and supports Trump’s so-called “crackdown.” She is self-hating because she also hates other black people. And most insulting — I guess most personal to me — is she has absolutely no respect or consideration for my sexual orientation. She knows I’m gay, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s a real thing in exactly the same way many people today do not accept that transgenderism is a real thing.
She is always carrying on about how she knows I want her body and she says it with so much anger. She said this yesterday in response to nothing at all.
“Listen. I know my body better than anyone, and you will never have it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Yes you do you fucking liar. And you’ll never get it.”
Yes this is the way she talks, at 89, with almost no ability to even push herself across the room in a wheelchair, or find her way back to her room because she’s forgotten where she stays.
But I also find it upsetting that someone who has known me for so many years — about 4 decades — can no longer accept, and maybe never did accept, that I actually am gay. That it’s a real thing and not a phase or an accident or something caused by the mother’s hormones in the womb. Perhaps one day they will find a gene that most gay people have in common — sort of like that gene that makes people sneeze when they get sunlight in their eyes, or the gene that causes some people to smell cilantro and think it smells like dish washing soap.
But never mind. The problem with dementia — perhaps one of the main problems people come to realize — is that you can no longer actually have a conversation. They are still the same personality, but the levels have shifted. She is on a level closer to that of a child. And I’m supposed to be the adult. And last night, after learning that she is being kicked out of the center, I never hated her more. She knew something was up but she could only be nasty about it and asked my co-guardian, “What’s wrong with his ass?”
And then two minute later she throws a fit, starts sobbing about the pain her mouth which wasn’t there last week. I just can’t take it anymore. I want to find a place and leave her there for other people to bother with. I will probably let them move her up to the second floor which is their memory unit and then we will look for a place that takes medicaid and provides memory services, or proper nursing care. But all I can see at this point is her continued decline and, because of her nasty personality, a lower and lower standard. Right now she’s in her own room with a small kitchenette and a tv and a table and a big bathroom. And she hates it. And they will kick her out and she will end up in a hospital type room with a curtain for privacy and virtually no room at all. And it will be all her fault because we have bent over backwards for the last year.
And ultimately it was the judge’s fault. but that’s another story.