capacity declaration: the end of a long struggle
a diary of my mother's stubborn resistance to accept help
20 March 2025:
Today I received the necessary Capacity Declarations so that I can make decisions for my mother. It has been a struggle and race. Six years of begging my mother to accept changes that come with aging did nothing. Six years of alerting her PCP, who had the audacity to say to my mother only three weeks before her fall, “I would hate assisted living too.”
So much struggle. The
fall. The gas. The ER.
And finally, here we are. Of course I felt swamped with relief, but also sad, so sad, to see all the things I’ve known, all the things I’ve been telling her primary care physician, and the two social workers I engaged, recorded on a page.
It was a collision of acknowledgment and loss that kneecapped me.
Oof. It's hard to see it in black and white. Whe my brother died of brain cancer, his death certificate listed excessive alcohol consumption as a contributing factor. This was a problem he never acknowledged, even though I more than once talked to him via phone while he was in a treatment facility trying to get sober.