have been trying to write this entry for weeks now. Everything I’ve typed has been worthy of nothing but the delete key. I came up with this title and I’ve liked that but no text meant to dangle beneath it has had any value at all. The sentences stumbled zombie-like out from my fingers. I simply have no idea how to command the paragraphs, to somehow force them to in some regal and logical way impart to you this story that I’ve been dreading to tell. It’s not easy. In fact, the subject hasn’t been this difficult in over ten years.

Those of you who weren’t around during the previous volume of this work, Shosetsu, missed my writing of my father’s death and his funeral. This struck around what was easily the worst part of my life: I had been caught cheating on a girl and was kicked out of where I lived because of it; I was essentially homeless; and I thought that I had lost the girl with whom, at the time, I was desperately in love (this being the girl with whom I was cheating). It was a ridiculous, melodramatic, and ultimately embarrassing time in my life and it just happened to intersect with the death of my father, an event I have never been able to recover from fully.

About a year ago, I was on the phone with my mother and she told me that she had stopped taking the medication with which she treated a hyperthyroid condition. She said that she felt fine and that she didn’t see the need for it any longer. I remember telling her that if she started to feel off that she should get right back on it. She promised that she would.

Now, hindsight provides me with a whole map of warning signs and red flags. As the months passed, she became increasingly repetitive. She would forget what she had told me and would brush it off as old age which seemed reasonable enough to me. It got to the point where I would dread talking to her which was something we did every week because I would be stuck in an ongoing conversation loop which would often feature nearly verbatim discussions and sentences. I attributed all of this to harmless old age. Again, in hindsight, these were all warnings and red flags.

Last September, I got married. Throughout the months before, I tried valiantly to convince my mother to fly up for the ceremony. She promised that she would but there was always hesitation in her voice. I figured it was because she had never flown in an airplane before and was nervous about airlines. Also, due to a medical side effect ten years earlier, she had none of her natural teeth and the dentures for which she had been fitted were uncomfortable for her and, instead of simply having them reset, she would, as often as she could, go without them. I figured this was a bit embarrassing for her outside of the close family. Flying half a country away to sit in a room filled with nothing but strangers, suffering uncomfortable teeth, was quite a psychological problem. I understood this and empathized. As time passed, she became increasingly agitated about the trip, kept using the word ‘if’ a lot, and I figured that she was too scared to fly and too guilty to tell me. Eventually, I relented and told her not to worry about it, that we wouldn’t be upset and would send her a ton of photos. My sister was going to make the trip with a friend of hers so at least I would have one member of my family present. I was fine with it. My wife-to-be was, as well. Again, this was a red flag.

As last year drew to a close, things began to worsen with her. The repetitions increased and my patience decreased. At the same time, it all just seemed normal. She was just getting older and I was a distracted newlywed dealing with many months of unemployment in an economy that was disintegrating. I just didn’t put any of it together. I didn’t connect it with stories from other relatives that seemed completely unrelated. I feel so fucking stupid now.

The new year began and soon I began to detect a problem. My mother was beginning to increasingly tell blatant lies. She was, as we quaintly term it now, ‘telling stories’. When I was telling her about some weird situation with my landlord, my mother claimed that my landlord had called her and affirmed something. Another time, I was telling her some event concerning my mother-in-law and my mother talked about how she had talked to her at one time on the phone. I know, for a fact, that it was simply not possible. These issues continued to escalate and I began to get very worried and I began discussing this with my sister.

More months pass and it gets increasingly worse at a disastrously alarming rate. Along with my mother’s increasing detachment from reality—which translated into an increase of these preposterous ‘stories’—, her paranoia, a feature which had reared it’s ugly head when I was a child but had since disappeared entirely, began to increase. She began to refuse to leave her house.

During the holidays last year, we mailed to her a box containing a creative scrapbook created by my wife full of photos from our wedding. I asked my mother if she had received it and she told me that the post office had tried to deliver it but that the mailman, who was familiar with her, had tried to leave it at the front door of the house (a door, by the way, which, throughout my life, my family never used; if the doorbell rang, it was clearly someone who had never been to our house before) but that the doorbell was broken so she had never heard it. She promised that next time the mailman would come through the garage and deliver the package properly. Several weeks later, the package appeared at our doorstep because they had tried three times to deliver it but no one would ever answer the door to pick it up. My mother had heard the doorbell ringing but was too terrified to answer. We still have the gift we made for her.

In February, after a particularly aggravating phone call, I realize that whatever is wrong with her isn’t going to right itself and has, in fact, worsened exponentially. My sister, who was also painfully aware of the situation, agreed that something needed to be done. Around this time, a woman with whom my mother has been a close friend since high school, who regularly checked in on her, brought her groceries (my mother hasn’t owned a car since my father died), found that my mother’s electricity had been shut off and that, instead of doing anything about it, was reading by flashlight. We quickly discovered that my mother had stopped paying her bills, including her credit cards. At this point, we took action.

There is more to this story, trust me, and I will continue it very soon. This topic is exhausting, as you might imagine, both mentally and emotionally. I know, also, that it is a heavy and distressing topic so I will leave you with what is, at least to me, a bit of amusement.

Two of my favorite stories that my mother has told me:

First, after my mother’s cable had been shut off due to non-payment, she told me that it had to do something with a fan in the attic. She somehow tied this into the operation of her coffee pot, which was somehow linked to our coffee pot (we don’t own a coffee pot, by the way) and that when she would switch the power on or off on her coffee pot would cause our coffee pot to turn on and off as well. And, somehow, this has an affect on whether her cable is on or not.

Second, and this is absolutely my favorite, when asked about whether she had talked to my grandmother, my mother told me that she normally talks to her on Wednesdays. When told that it was Wednesday today, she scoffed and said that of course it was Wednesday where she lives but it was Thursday where my grandmother lived, a mere 90 minutes away.

That’s some genius comedy of a deteriorating mind. And, this allows me to circle back to the beginning of this post where I wrote about how difficult it was to write about this. You may think that the difficulty is obvious but it’s not. You see, my father died suddenly; he had hidden his illness from all of us. So, when he died, it was like a gunshot wound. My mother, however, although she is not dying, at least not yet, is fading away at an incredibly slow rate. It’s like watching someone die.

I’d rather it be sudden. Having her slip slowly from my grasp is unbearable.

Un-fucking-bearable.