Tell your story, tell your truth, it’s all you have.
I’ve heard that in 12-step recovery meetings over and over.
All I have is my experience, strength, and hope.
On caregiving, forgetting & remembering.
I’m still figuring out what’s true, what’s not, and what next right thing people are talking about when they say: Just do the next right thing.
I came to write about life as a caregiver to a parent with dementia; to write through trying not to lose my mind as she loses hers; writing through the excavation of my own memories as hers slip away.
I came to see if there was a book.
I don’t think of myself as a book writer. I’m more of an alcoholic Erma Bombeck; a weekly columnist if Erma had escaped the suburbs, skirted the commitment of kids, ran from the intimacy of a long-term relationship, been drunk and sober, wild and responsible, only to find herself eventually inextricably attached to the long-term care of a Benjamin Buttoning mother, who was less becoming someone else than she is un-becoming herself.
Yeah, that’s just the kind of Erma I am.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem says:
Given enough time, a hypothetical monkey typing at random will almost surely produce all of Shakespeare’s plays.
Wikipedia says:
The probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time even a hundred thousand orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low, but not actually zero.
Not. Actually. Zero.
I haven’t had a drink in over thirty years.
Longshots are what this particular monkey does best. Welcome to my monkey brain.
I came to write about us. her. me. him. them. before. and the way secrets stain the lives of everyone we touch.
What Is A Long Goodbye?
Dementia caregiving is sometimes called the long goodbye because you can spend years grieving someone who hasn’t died (yet), but each day they’re a little less here. You’ll go through all the Kübler-Ross stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and hopefully, eventually, acceptance. Maybe all in the same day, and that’s just a regular Tuesday.
Who am I if I’m not actually Erma Bombeck?
I’m a sixty-something, single, childless, sober writer who’s spent years writing about sex, drugs, and drunkenness. I got sober at thirty-three after picking up a long-haired sober biker cop in a bar, because life is lifey and you never know what your angels will look like.
Prior to that night, I’d been having lots the sex, drugs, drunkenness, and lots of unintended consequences—but I didn’t have that insight, or that vocabulary yet. After that night there was still a lot of the sex, but I got to remember it, which was sometimes fun, other times, regrettable.
I have an AA in Theater- which means I can be a waitress
I have a BA in English - which qualifies me to…well, nothing
I have an MFA in Creative Writing - which means I’m officially certified to use multi-syllabic hyphenated words like multi-syllabic to tell a story.
So, here I am, doing pretty much the only thing I’m qualified to do because I was a shit waitress.
I’m no longer working, or teaching because, face it, what with chasing Mom as she skips down the road to full blown dementia, I’m fucking exhausted all the time. Plus,
Multi-syllabic words take a lot of energy to use correctly so there will not be a superfluity of sesquipedalian discourse.
I have the degree, that’s gonna have to be enough for you.
I’ve been her caregiver for almost twelve years. At eighty-eight, she moved in with me bringing her DNR bracelet & the book, Final Exit. She got the bedroom, I moved into a corner of the living room. Since 2018, we’ve been sharing a not-particularly-large one-bedroom apartment along with, at one point, five cats.
We’d expected she had a year, two at the most. I’d trained as a doula for the dying, a companion for those in the last stages of life. It didn’t prepare me for living with someone who would tell me regularly she only has two weeks to live. It changed me in ways I couldn’t have predicted.
What you’ll find inside…
What subscribers are saying…
"I love when people write on topics that some people are afraid to read." Sanna Salanimi - Frisson For Freaks
"Your words resonate with me more than anything else I've read about the journey with dementia as a caregiver. Even though my mom passed recently, it helps to know someone out there truly gets it."
Leslie Adams
"Thanks for being so open and honest about being a caregiver. It's very helpful to me."
Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Newsletter and Open Secrets
"Jodi's Long Goodbye is about living, it's heart-wrenching beautiful and fun. She admits things: "She knew what things did, but not how to name them. Her silverware drawer was "the place we keep the things we eat with." You know where and how it will end, but..."
Prajna O'Hara - The Salty Crone
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