Urinetown Or Boomers Get Their Comeuppance
Writing by treason on Saturday, 22 of April , 2006 at 7:25 am
If someone had told me that my mother would be alive at age 82 I would never have believed it. All through my childhood she regularly told us she was dying, and when I was in college, she was hospitalized when an enormous tumor was discovered in her uterus. She survived, her uterus did not. Hmmmm. Forty years too late.
My mother’s mother died in ‘32, her father died in ‘62, my father died in ‘70, my stepfather died in ‘81 (on my mother’s birthday to be exact), my sister died in ‘03, and my mother’s brothers and sisters - close to a dozen of them - are all dead now, too. As another sister has pointed out: “There’s a pattern here.”
I was visiting her to a) cut her hair (I can’t take her to a professional anymore - she has no bladder control), b) deliver her sack of prescriptions, and c) collect her wet, smelly clothes. I filled a large plastic bag.
“Is that all my laundry? How do I dirty all those clothes? Where do I go?”
“In your pants. That’s where you go.”
“Oh. Are you cooking dinner tonight?”
“If I want to eat, yes, probably.”
“Sausage and peppers sounds good.” She asked about my sister Linda. “How’s Linda?”
“She’s still dead.”
“Oh. Are you cooking dinner tonight? Sausage and peppers sounds good.”
After my sister died, my other sister took my mother to her house. It didn’t last long. “I have children,” my sister explained. “I don’t want to die. You don’t have children, so you should take her.”
True, she has children. Adult children, but why nitpick? But I see her point. She has a reason to live. When she’s senile and pissing herself, chances are, one of those kids will take on the responsibility of caretaking.
Caretaking. An interesting concept, really. Studies show that a lot of caretakers die, while the person with the illness lives on. Why is that? Well, it’s obvious, really. And that’s what has me intrigued. I’ve always been interested in germs, flesh-eating bacteria, spontaneous human combustion, hydrophobia, bubonic plague, Creuzdtfelt-Jacob disease - all sorts of things that ravage a human being.
But recently I’ve become even more interested in how illness affects not just the victim, but rather the “victims” around the victim. It’s why I’ve decided to go back to school and pursue a degree in a field that is going to require all the courses I didn’t take for my other degree, like Algebra, Chemistry, Physiology. At 17, I wanted to be a veterinarian. A person asked me what I’d do if someone brought me a dog that had been hit by a car, and when I said that I would scream, run out of the room, and call a vet, I knew the job wasn’t for me.
But time has passed and I’ve seen a lot of life. And death. I can do this now. I figure I don’t have children to assume the burden, but if my heart should explode or I have a stroke, chances are I’ll be at work in a hospital, and eventually someone there will address the issue.
I heard the other day that in the event of a bird flu pandemic, 46% of healthcare workers said they wouldn’t show up to work because they have families. Fine. I don’t. Give me their f*cking paychecks - I’ll be there with bells on.
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