It's been a minute.

Hello, I am still here plodding along on the rollercoaster of life. To be honest, all I have been managing to do for the last few months is breathe and get through each day. I am back in therapy with a therapist I have seen previously. I explained to her that I just needed support this time. I am not trying to better myself or discover more about myself or process stuff that has happened to me. All I need at present is to offload, feel heard and be supported. She agreed.

It is different from past therapy but it has been so helpful and still very much an act of processing the difficult relationship with my father. Right now I am caught up and drowning in the midst of the tumultuous turmoil of his later life. But in years to come I hope to reflect on this time with a clearer perspective and possible greater understanding. That is one of the reasons I have not felt able to write about the here and now. It is all too much. It has been overwhelming.

I watched a hospice nurse talking on YouTube about how people die as they have lived. So a calm person would most likely die a calm death. Conversely, my father has lived a life of frenzied emotional agitation and now he is dying in the same manner. Although no medical professional has yet uttered the words 'end of life', we realise, as does he, that death is on the horizon.

I have always found it difficult being around my father and now is no exception. But still it is heartbreaking when I find that others who now take responsibility for his care do not seem to fulfil their duty of care for him. He is a human, almost 92 years old and I feel and have always said all I want is for him to be respected and his needs met by those caring for him.

[I will write more about these horrendous miscarriages of care at a later date.] To see him bloodied, battered and bruised by horrific falls is sickening and so unnecessary if only the care homes did as their name suggests. I know when the elderly bruise it always looks ten times worse than it normally is but his bruises are absolutely awful. He looks like he has been in a street fight and lost badly.

I hope his future place of residence is a place of compassion, respect and a much higher level of nurturing care.

As for me, I will be okay. Maybe in the near future, I will have time and space for me.

I can but hope.