jmgoyder

A contingency is an unexpected or unpredicted event. I am sure there are deeper philosophical definitions but that’s who/how I see it.

So you cannot plan for contingencies because they just happen. I am learning how to be ready for them, to deal with them and to stop trying to figure them out.

Dementia is place where contingencies flourish, watered by leaking brain cells and lit by twilight. These contingencies are not funny or exciting like coincidences; they are cruel and cleverly shocking.

Over the last two evenings my phone conversations with Anthony have been disturbing as I described in yesterday’s posts.

So, later this afternoon, I am going to go into the nursing lodge and face this evening’s inevitable contingency with Anthony. We will have a small red wine with each other, I will make sure he eats his dinner (which he apparently refused last night), I will hug him and reassure him and I will talk to the staff and get their perspectives.

But I have a confession to make; I don’t want to do this because lately (despite the excursion out to the farm the other day), it is becoming an unpleasant experience for both of us. He makes accusations, begs to come home and sometimes rebuffs me – or else he clings to me, making us both weep when I leave to go home without him.

There must be a way of making this better – there must be. So many of my ideas have failed and, with each contingency, I have to rethink things again, over and over again, which is silly really because nobody can plan, organize, predict or be ready for a contingency.

And it seems self-indulgent to blog about a single situation when a hurricane had just devastated and killed so many, when millions are affected by ongoing wars, when children are being hurt, animals abandoned, forests dessimated – almost too overhwhelming to comprehend from my tiny little space of the here and now.

Once upon a time, Ants and I would have talked about these contingencies with gusto and passion because they were not our contingencies and we could philosophize from our coccoon of safeness.

Now we flutter, like moths with missing wings.