I realize now why Mom beat it back to her condo after moving to a retirement community didn't work for her. It wasn't the big impersonal place or the money or the lack of social interaction—all the reasons she gave for dragging up and moving home. I'm guessing it was the massive disruption of every single routine she had patched together over the years to maintain her life as her brain lost its ability to function.She knew her brain was stuttering before 2014. In 2015, she moved to the retirement place. She was there a month and a half. Now I see it must have been a particular subtle form of hell. On the surface, it had seemed like a great solution to help her move into the next phase. Instead, it was as if she had voluntarily set off a neutron bomb in her life. Nobody anticipated the consequences, certainly not her. Well, how many of us have actually seen the consequences of a neutron bomb exploding in our kitchen, let's say, or in our home office?
For most of the next two years, she white-knuckled it in the condo, trying to keep it together, with increasing help from me. There were many clues, I realize now, looking back, but I didn't know what I was seeing. The dirty kitchen, the rotten food, the mice, the ants, the misfolded towels . . . all signs of her mental deterioration.
Now I realize how desperately she clung to her routines. Once the routines failed her, she had to let go and admit she couldn't maintain the facade, she couldn't manage the details of her life anymore—the preparation of food, the cleaning of kitchen counters, the washing and folding of clothes. All too much. It was as if she had been clinging to one little branch of a wizened shrub growing at the edge of an abyss. Whether the branch broke or she let go on purpose, she fell.
She came to rest in a retirement home with levels of care. Levels of care means that as long as she can pay for it, they will take care of her until the end, but of course, it will cost more as her care needs increase. She entered in 2017 at a Level 2. Now she's at the top end of Level 5. Soon she'll be a Level 6, out of seven levels.
I cling to my routines. I realize they cannot save me, but they give me comfort, a sense of false security, which helps whenever I reflect on the precarious of life, which I do daily.
As a researcher, I'm always reflecting. Given my current situation, I often reflect on life and death. Before I lose my ability to maintain my routines, I would like to plan my exit strategy. Knowing this about me, a friend gave me an information sheet about the efficacy of suicide methods. I thought that was very thoughtful. In this study, about three hundred people rated twenty-eight suicide methods used in about four thousand cases of attempted suicide according to their perceptions of lethality, time, and agony. You can look it up. I did. Just Google lethality, time, and agony, and it will pop right up. It's a 1995 study published in a journal about suicide behaviors.
If you are shopping around, the most lethal method, not surprisingly, according to this sample, is a shotgun shot to the head. According to this sample, that action would be almost one hundred percent fatal. However, about one percent of the cases would live, probably not too well after such a traumatic incident. Perhaps not even well enough to think, gosh, I wish I hadn't done that. I'm guessing. However, if you are in the lucky fatal group, you can enjoy a low amount of agony (5.5 on a 100-point scale) for fewer than two minutes. Not bad, as suffering goes. I know people who suffer a lot more than that just trying to balance their checkbooks.
If you are in a hurry, pointing the shotgun at your chest instead of your head will get you there a fraction of a minute sooner, but your odds of surviving go up a few percentage points. Darn. Not only that, it will hurt more too (16 points compared to 5.5 for the head shot).
If it's agony you want to avoid, overdosing on illegal drugs is the way to go. You can expect about 5.25 worth of agony on the 100-point scale, whatever that means. However, your time to die could be almost two hours, and you'll only succeed half the time. Which means you might live to tell your sad tale of enduring two hours of slight suffering before somebody saved you. However, keep in mind, this study was conducted way back in 1995, which means the opioid epidemic hadn't been invented yet. I'm pretty sure adding fentanyl and its ilk to the list of methods would knock shotgun to the head right out of the top five.
It's helpful to remember that the values are the respondents' perceptions about the lethality, time to die, and amount of suffering. As far as I can tell without paying to download the article, none of them had direct experience with the phenomenon.
Well, I'm off to visit Mom. If we are lucky, some reruns of the Three Stooges will be on MeTV. It's great to hear Mom laugh.
