Clarification

So I'm back in Pgh for a week, then, AFAIK, off to the shore with my dad & stepfamily for a BADLY NEEDED vacation.

I just wanted to clarify one thing in my last post that, upon rereading, I realized it would not make sense for the general blog audience. Some friends i have been telling more than others. And family knows all these details too but some people don't.

I wanted to clarify the part where I was talking about choices and emotionally toxic environments. It was in the last few lines of my post.

1) I said "my mom made her choice." What I mean by that is her choice to refuse treatment for a medical condition that is not (I hate this word) "terminal." I have very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I think it's important to have autonomy and to be allowed to pass with dignity.

On the other hand, I know my mom has had depression, which she has refused to be diagnosed with (meaning she did not accept the diagnosis and take meds for it, nor did she engage in serious talk therapy for the length of time where it would have lasting beneficial power) for quite a long time, maybe since I was a teenager. Her untreated depression has impacted her ability to get along with family members, to make sound decisions BEFORE this all came to a head, and to make friends, which, besides just the fact that friends are great (thank you friends of Jill!), would increase her support network in times of crisis.

Also, living in the environment she has chosen, a very rural town with pretty good-but-not-the-quality-of-urban medical care (i.e. needing to be driven hours to get certain procedures done, perceived burden on support network) is another factor. I'm not sure how much it has influenced her decision.

Providing an environment where people with chronic illness can have a good quality of life, even if they are poor, is a societal issue that needs to be fixed before I can accept that "right to die" is more good than bad.

I DON'T MEAN TO ELICIT A DISCUSSION OF GENERAL RIGHT-TO-DIE ISSUES WITH THIS BLOG POST AS I CANNOT HANDLE IT AT THIS TIME.

2) I said something else in my previous post about emotionally toxic environments. Even though I have suffered XXXXXXXX SURVIVED childhood abuse from my mother, I don't mean that her sickness alone has created an emotionally toxic environment for this particular trip to GA. What I mean is, SOMEONE had made the decision to keep the severity of her illness from my Gran, who lives in the same house and has age-related dementia.

Which means if it were just me and my mom and my aunt and uncle on this trip, I think, although it's a horrible circumstance, I could have stayed the whole time w/o having... shall we say... a nervous breakdown and having to leave a day early. It's the fact that I had to keep my emotions from my Gran, and thus from the environment in general, that really drove me over the edge. I don't know whose decision this was, but I still don't think it's the right one. I *do* know that my family on the maternal side has been all about preserving secrets that would have been somehow controversial or upsetting to certain family members.

Here's a fairly benign example. My other aunt was a Catholic school teacher. She *loved* her job. My grandfather (who was pretty much tyrannical) railed at her all the time because teaching at a Catholic school did not make enough money as would, say, teaching at a public school. Or [insert another business-type job that would make more money].

Like I said, my aunt loved her kids, where she was teaching, etc. I don't know how much of this decision was to appease my grandfather or what, but she got a job as an insurance claims processor. She tried at that job for awhile, but HATED it. She wanted to go back to teaching. So she did. BUTBUTBUT we were not allowed to tell my grandfather that she went back to teaching. This lie lasted years and years and years. Until the day he passed, my grandfather thought my aunt was an insurance claims processor, or some other job that was NOT a teacher.

There have been less benign family secrets than the one about my aunt and her teaching, but they are not appropriate for a blog available to the entire internet. I believe, however, that preserving secrets is like allowing sores to fester and become infected. Sooner or later the secret will come out and when it does, it will be far worse than if it came out earlier.