Monday night she was in tears. She attributed this to the death of her cat, Jack. Totally understandable. She loved him, she had him a long time and he died in her bed. He'd been sick for quite some time – her daughter had time to come up for a visit to say goodbye – so it surprised me that when he began failing she didn't put him down. "Vets out here (in SoCal) charge $1,000 just for a needle prick," she explained.
First of all, I don't believe that. Even $500 sounds high for euthanasia. $1,000 is impossible. But you know what? Even if it was $1,000, she should have gotten it somehow. That's the deal we make when we adopt our furbabies: we give them the best life we possibly can and then ease them out of their suffering when the time comes. My friend was unable to do that. Rather than take her cat to the vet last summer, when he began having gastrointestinal issues, she started dousing him with Kaopectate. She knows how I feel about this. It would have been unkind to bring it up when she was in tears. But I'd be dishonest if I didn't say it occurred to me. Now that little Jack is dead and the suffering he likely endured at the end is over, what makes me saddest is that somewhere inside her, my oldest friend may know I'm right. It must be miserable to live with that.
Then she segued to her "nervous breakdown." She told me that had begun hallucinating and losing her balance. I have no doubt that's true. It's the timeline that infuriates me. I've known since last summer that she sees/responds to things that aren't there and then doesn't acknowledge it ever happened. Last Christmas she told me she spent several days at her daughter's apartment because she was so unsteady on her feet she couldn't go home. She promised then that she was "going to" discuss all this with her primary care physician. I asked her this past Monday what happened when, back then, she spoke to her doctor about the hallucinations and the falling down. "I don't know," she said. "I guess I didn't."
What the ever-loving fuck?
Anyway, she told me that, a couple weeks ago, her hallucinations were so bad that her roommates* were concerned and she was taken to the hospital. It was decided that she was over-medicated and reacting to the three antidepressants she's been taking. The ER docs conferred with her psychiatrist and took her off one of the meds. She tells me it has a long half life in her system and so she doesn't know if she's miserable because her Jack died or from withdrawal from the drug. Um ... I don't know how much of what I just wrote is accurate. It doesn't really matter, does it? There's nothing I can do about it from this distance.
Which leads us to her son. Her oldest child, her favorite, is well over 30. He's married and lives outside Philly. She told me in January that she thought it was "funny" he was worried about her meeting a Chinese-American for lunch. You think it's funny your son is a bigot? OK. Anyway, Monday she made no mention of Fred, the man she said she'd begun dating, and tearfully told me she hasn't heard from her son since Christmas. She was so hurt that, when his sister called to tell him their mother was in the ER, he said, "5150 her" and hasn't called since. So which is it? Is he an overprotective son who worries about his mother's dating life? Or is he callous and uninvolved? Did Fred even exist? I have no idea.
She's been posting pictures of Jack on Facebook. Taken just before he died. The poor little thing was emaciated. That's just wrong. Nothing I can do about it.
Nothing I can do about any of this.
She is, by her own choice, 2000 miles away. She doesn't listen to a thing I say anyway. I have suggested she go to church and reconnect with God. That she do some kind of charity work to ground her and get her out of her own head (I even offered to send her stamps and stationery so she could write Letters Against Isolation). I've told her how important my movie group is to me and tried to get her to join one. I might as well be talking to my stapler.
And yet I know she is suffering. I don't know how much of what she tells me is true but I believe she is miserable and unable somehow to do anything to alleviate her own pain.
Her soul is turbulent. Her body is rebelling. Her sweet skinny Jack died.
All I can do is pray for her.
*She shares a ranch house with 3 other seniors. They each have their own bedroom and share kitchen/bathroom privileges. It's kinda like The Golden Girls.
