(Trigger warnings and such. Be on your guard.)

Some of you were probably wondering why I vanished.

Two months and a day since my last post. Nothing on here since October 3rd, when before that I was posting every single week, pretty consistently — I lost it in May and June, sure, but that’s the end of the school year; there’s no particular reason why October and November would see me go dark and silent. I mean, sure, October is the month of darkness, and — can I make any connection between Thanksgiving and silence? Or no, how about Veterans’ Day? Or Indigenous People’s Day, maybe?

Never mind. I don’t have it in me to joke or to bullshit much.

I do apologize for my absence; I really did intend to stay consistent for as long as I could, and I still want to write. But both things became impossible about ten days after my last post. In the time intervening, I have learned some more about what I’m capable of, and what I’m not, and more about what matters and what doesn’t.

What matters is the truth. What doesn’t matter is polite fictions.

So the truth is, my father-in-law — step-father-in-law, really — killed himself. He used a gun. He was 87, and a drug addict, among other things. He was also a veteran, a former US Marine, and so for the sake of Veterans’ Day and all, I don’t want to get into too much detail about him or the circumstances or the reasons for his death. But he did it at his home in Kingman, on the other end of Arizona from where my wife and I live in Tucson, about ten days after my last post — somewhere around the 13th of October. And that’s why I haven’t posted, or written, since that last post two months ago: because my wife and I have been dealing with the consequences of his death.

You see, one other thing my stepfather-in-law — his name was Wes, which is much shorter than his title, so I’m going to use that — one other thing Wes was, was his wife’s caretaker. My mother-in-law, Jo. Jo has advanced dementia. She doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, she suffered a pair of traumatic brain injuries stemming from two falls she took, both of which resulted in a concussion, in the last few years. She has also gone through some unknown number of mini-strokes. She had been living at home with Wes, who was physically disabled but mentally capable — up until he killed himself.

I got a phone call on the morning of Sunday the 15th of October. I was outside working on my driveway — I’m expanding it because we got a second car, a sweet bright orange 1973 VW Bug — and I wasn’t expecting a call. I normally wouldn’t have answered it: I don’t like phone calls, and I don’t like getting them on the last day of my week-long fall break, which that Sunday was. But I looked at the phone, because I had called Wes the day before and left a message; he had fallen and hurt his knee — he has bad knees (Sorry: he had bad knees) — and had told me he was in a lot of pain, when I talked to him somewhere around the 9th or 10th of October, I don’t remember when. I wanted to tell him then that my wife and I would do anything we could to help. I didn’t say it, though. It wouldn’t have mattered. But I called him on Saturday the 14th, and left him a message saying I was checking in to see how he was doing.

Turns out he was dead. And Jo was at that point in the hospital, though I didn’t know it when I called.

I found that out when I answered the phone Sunday morning: because I looked at my phone, and it was Wes’s daughter, my wife’s stepsister, Dana. I’d never spoken to Dana before: she and Wes hadn’t been that close, and she never got along with Jo, or Toni, my wife. So if she was calling me, I knew it was serious, and it was probably bad. So I answered.

And she told me, tearfully, that her dad was dead, and that Jo was in the hospital. She didn’t know many details, other than the fact that Toni is the executor of both of their wills, as well as the possessor of a durable power of attorney and the responsible party for their medical decisions if they were incapable of making them themselves, for both Wes and Jo. Dana wanted to make sure that Toni would let her take some personal items to remember her father by. I told her that would be completely fine, of course, that I’d talk to Toni and we’d be in touch.

I hung up. I cussed a lot. I felt the beginnings of sadness — but more dread. We had seen some kind of crisis coming for a long time, and here it was.

Then I went inside and told Toni.

So in the last two months — not quite two months, I guess, though it sure feels like three or four years — Toni and I have made two trips to Kingman, a six-hour drive; we have brought Jo down to Tucson and found her a place in a memory care unit in a local assisted living facility. We were able to pay for it because my family has loaned us money, which we expect to pay back when we sell their house — which, the fates and gods willing, should happen very very soon. The second trip was all for dealing with their house. My brother, who had just left his job as a software engineer in order to pursue his personal projects, gave up his time and energy to help us, and drove to Kingman from Mason County, Washington, to help with the house. Together the three of us emptied a three-bedroom house of a couple’s accumulated possessions; we kept everything we thought Jo could use in her new living situation, and donated everything we thought was donatable. The rest went to the landfill. Then my brother, who stayed at the house for an extra week after Toni and I came back to Tucson to go back to teaching, cleaned up and repaired everything that could be done in the house, making it ready to go on the market, which it did, right after Thanksgiving.

We also made sure that Wes got cremated and his daughter took his remains. She also got to take whatever she wanted of his, as did his nephew, who also came to help that first weekend.

We also took care of their two pet dogs. Which I am not going to talk about.

We are still trying to finish arranging things for Jo: the assisted living is, as you may know, ridiculously expensive — over $5,000 a month, all included. It’s a good place: and also one of the cheaper ones in Tucson. But obviously we can’t afford to pay for it. It is not clear how long Jo will live, but it doesn’t matter because we couldn’t pay for one month on our own. And when we first brought her home from the hospital in Kingman, we took care of her for four days: and after that, there was no question that we can not take care of her ourselves. She needs constant care, at a professional level, and we just can’t do that. She will get social security, and since Wes was a veteran, she gets survivor’s benefits; we’re hoping for somewhere in the range of $3000-4000 a month out of those two along with a small pension Wes had which will transfer to Jo. The rest of her monthly costs will come out of the proceeds from selling their house, which fortunately they owned outright — though they did have a reverse mortgage which we will have to pay off out of the proceeds, first. When that money runs out, if Jo lives that long, there is a program called the Arizona Long Term Care System, which should cover the rest of the monthly expense of her care. We may need to find her a cheaper place to live in order to qualify for that program, I don’t know yet — we can’t apply for it until she has less than $2000 in assets.

The point is that we are two months into this, and $15,000 deep, at least. We are still waiting to find out how much money Jo will get from the government.

My wife hasn’t slept well in two months. She has nightmares. I am sleeping better than she is, but I have struggled trying to keep my calm with my students. I snapped on them, the day before we drove up to Kingman for the first time. Snapped harder than I have in two years, and it wasn’t justified. I don’t feel bad, it’s just where I was at the time.

Here’s what I’ve learned from this.

Suicide is an act of violence which harms all of those around the victim. It does not spare anyone from anything: it makes things worse. I guess it spares the dead person. It certainly seems to have been Wes’s escape. I loved the guy, but if it sounds like I’m mad at him and I blame him for what he did, I fucking am, and I fucking do.

Dementia is a terrible condition. Trauma is worse.

There’s not much sadder than the place where someone used to live, and the things they used to own.

The government is slow, but they do good things. Banks and hospitals are fast, and expensive, and they are ABSOLUTELY FUCKING TERRIBLE. (That is not universal. Some wonderful people work in hospitals, along with some bags of crap. Banks seem to be all bad, but my wife and my mother-in-law both worked for banks, so they’re not all bad people. Foothills Bank, a subsidiary of Glacier Bank, though? Absolute garbage.) The real estate industry is both fast and good — but not cheap. It’s okay, they’re worth it.

Insurance is a good thing. You should get some, and then you should keep it. As much as you can. If you are aging, and in ill health with physical disabilities, and you have home health care insurance, FUCKING KEEP THE GODDAMN INSURANCE. Please. I beg you. This shit is too expensive for anyone to just pay for. I know that insurance premiums are costly, too, but this is so much worse: so much more expensive, and so much harder to deal with when you have to deal with the problems of getting sick people what they need, right now, and hope you can find a way to pay for it, too. Get the insurance. Pay for it.

When someone asks how you are, tell the truth. I have spent my life lying and saying I am fine when I’m not. That’s not to say I’ve never been fine; I have lived a good life so far, and I have mostly been fine; but when I’m not, I have always lied. It felt rude to bring people down just because I felt bad and they asked how I was. But I stopped doing that this last two months, and — it’s better. I don’t go into detail — this post is more than I’ve said to any but a handful of people — but when people ask how I am, I make a face, sort of a grimace, and I say, “Not good.” If they want to know and have a right, I tell them something like “There was a death in the family and we’re dealing with the estate;” if they don’t ask or have a right to know, I leave it at Not good. They say they’re sorry I’m going through shit, sometimes they offer to help. I thank them.

It is better than politeness.

The hardest thing has been that we did not know what Wes and Jo were going through. They needed help: and we didn’t know it, because they never said. Wes complained, constantly; but he never asked for help. We tried to get them to move closer to us so we could help; this past summer they agreed — but then Wes changed his mind. He said it would be too hard for Jo to make the transition. He might have been right. But it’s now entirely fucking clear that staying where they were could not work.

So the most important thing I have learned is this: when you need help, ask for help. Don’t be ashamed of need. Don’t back away from help because you don’t know what other people can do for you, or how it will work or what the costs and consequences will be: ask for help from someone you trust, and figure it out with them. I have gotten help from my family, from my friends, from my employer. I have given help, as well; I have been able to do so because I got the help I needed.

If Wes had asked for help, then we could have helped him get the help he needed to take care of Jo, and this horror might not have happened. Instead he hurt all of us, by killing himself. He would have done that anyway: it was not because he was abandoned and alone, he was surrounded by people who loved him, who were willing to help him; he was suicidal for many reasons that had nothing to do with help. But this situation wouldn’t have been as bad, particularly for Jo, if people had been able to help. We would at least have known what was happening, even if we couldn’t have done anything to make it better. The unfortunate truth might have made everyone unhappy: but it would have been better than not knowing.

Please ask for help.

Forgive me for not writing more often; I am also (Though this is not the most important thing) trying to finish my book, and my scant writing time and energy goes to that more than this blog. But I’ve been trying to write this post for two months, and failing; I needed to do this. I apologize, as well, if this has been hard to read, but I won’t lie about how I am. I am not well. I’m better than I was a month or so ago; that first week was by far the worst. I might need to write about all of this more; I will, when I can. I’ll write about other things, too — I have a couple of humdingers in me about school from the last two months.

Please go tell the people you love that you love them. And if you need help — ask for it. Don’t lie about how you are. The truth is better.