Barbara worried about how her mother’s dementia would develop. But when her mother died unexpectedly, she realized she had been wasting her energy worrying.
Transcript
The parts that I found more difficult to negotiate with were things like the constant layer of worry in my brain that I didn’t know was there. It just was, and it was constantly eating away and interrupting sleep, and all of the “what ifs”. And it was just like, I sort of pictured it as this red layer of gelatine just sort of working a way in there, and interrupting things that I wanted to do, and just adding a layer.
And the fear of that, because she was my one remaining relative at that point. But she got a bladder infection that moved into pneumonia, and, like, out of the blue was dead within 10 days. So all of the times that I had spent, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do when she doesn’t know me?” “How am I going to deal with moving her from where she lives into more of a care facility?” All of those types of things, all of those hours I had spent worrying and fussing where I had this little layer in my brain that was just always aware these were decisions I was going to have to make, ends up being a complete waste of time and energy because her life ended as she would have wanted it.
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