Today, I hate people. Don't try to talk to me or I might have to bite you, or I might say something really really mean. Come back tomorrow.

*updated 9/28* Today is not better. I have wanted to smack every person who has spoken to me. This mood needs to improve by about a million, and soon.

I realized earlier this evening that tomorrow is my only free night until next week. I spent this past weekend working on Mary Anne's apartment, and a couple of hours last night. It's done though, now all that's left is two garage sales to sell the stuff we're not keeping for her, and I'm going to ebay a few things. I am utterly exhausted, and I know my mom is too. But the end is in sight, for this part at least. I need to sort through all the stuff that somehow ended up at my house.

It's not all bad though I suppose. I did end up with a couple of cool things, and in amongst the unbelievable mass of crap were a few gems, like this one:

I heard my mom gasp from the other room, but that was nothing new. People had been gasping and exclaiming "Oh my god!" all day long, usually because they had found something frightening (like when Keegan opened a box in a closet and was greeted by a fur stole that was staring a him). But this time my mom walked in and handed me two square, white edged, black and white photos. The top one was of Mary Anne dressed as a geisha. Then there was the photo above. I looked at it for a moment and it took that long for me to realize that I was looking at.

That's my mom. Halloween(ish) 1967, which would make her barely 24. She had already met my dad but they were not together until a year or so later. She looks so young and pretty here. It's a real uniform that she had borrowed from one of her friends. She told me that she actually had a couple of girls flirting with her because they thought she was a boy. She said she knew this photo existed, but hadn't seen it since before she married my dad, nearly 36 years ago. It's the only copy. I had to beg and plead and promise before she'd let it out of her posession to be taken home and scanned so I could have a print made for myself. I haven't ordered one yet, but I'm thinking I'll have it framed nicely and hang it on my wall, as well as order a smaller print to put in my scrapbook.

I've been wanting to post this all week, but haven't wanted to think about it again. But I might as well think about it, because I have to face it again tomorrow.

My mom has a friend she's known since college named Mary Anne (little tidbit that I find funny- her "group" in college was 4 women; Mary Alice (my mom) Mary Anne, Mary Aline and Mary Eileen). Mary Anne is my sister's Godmother, and she's been a reasonably active part of our lives for as long as I can remember- closer than many family members in fact. Now that I'm older I realize that she has always had this young girl air about her. She's 65 now, has never been married, and has some pretty antiquated ideas of what "proper behavior" is. She wore this outfit to my sister's wedding- that she made herself- that I don't think I've ever seen on anyone older than four. (I'm not knocking her, I'm just giving some background). Sometimes I feel like I don't like her very much because I don't understand her, but her presence in my life is a part of me, and for that I will always love her.

She's always had health problems, and in March of this year she went into the hospital. She doesn't have any health insurance, so she was in San Francisco General. It's a city run hospital, and is actually a pretty scary place. There are three locked wards there, and one of those is a jail. But, it's where you go when you can't pay for a private hospital. My mom is the executor of her estate, and while Mary Anne has been in the hospital she has had financial power of attorney. Basically what that means is that my mom can cash Mary Anne's pension and social security and use that money to pay the rent on her apartment, and her related bills so that she'll have a place to come home to. My mom and 2 other friends (not the Marys from college) have been doing what they can to take care of things for her.

In July Mary Anne was transferred to Laguna Honda Hospital, a long term care facility that is also run by the city. People with no insurance and no one to take care of them go there for, well, long term care. They said she'd be there for at least six months, and now it's looking like it might be closer to a year. I'm not sure what is wrong with her that she has to stay that long, but I hate that she is there at all.

My mom has been to visit her a lot. I went for the first time last Saturday, and I never want to see that place again. I will of course, at least a few times, but I will hate every moment. My mom and I pulled into the parking lot last Saturday, which is at the back of the building, and I couldn't believe my eyes. 20 or so people were milling around the doors, including a black woman in a peach robe and a shower cap, sitting in a wheelchair with a cast from hip to ankle on one leg. She's the only one that stands out in my mind from the crowd.

"Mom... What is this place?"

"It's Laguna Honda Hospital," she said. I've never seen anything like it. When we walked in we had to sign our names in a book and the guard gave us visitor tags that said K5 on them, which was the ward Mary Anne is in. When we got to K5 we had to sign in again in another book. It did not escape my notice that the last five entries in the book were either my mom or Paula, another friend of Mary Anne's. Those five entries spanned a 10 day period. There had been no other visitors to this ward in that long.

We entered the ward and I fought to keep my emotions down. I tried to figure out what sort of nightmare I had walked into. There were 30 beds in this large room. All of them were full. Nothing separated these beds but a curtain and a few feet. I tried not to stare but it's hard. Most had their own tv's, which were on. All seemed to have visitor chairs, piled with things because there was never anyone to sit in them. Who were these people? Where were their families, thier friends? Why did only one person in this room of thirty have people to visit them? There were brightly colored afghans on almost every bed, but rather than making the room cheerful they seemed to make the pale gray-green walls sadder. Our visit lasted about an hour but I could not enjoy it.

If you're in Laguna Honda more than two months you have to sign over any and all income to them to pay for your care. Thusly there is no longer money for my mom to keep her apartment for her. Tomorrow and Sunday I will go with my mother and some other friends to clean out the last stuff in her apartment. She's lived alone for a long time, and she's a major packrat. She has a two bedroom apartment in San Francisco (in Noe Valley! $700 a month! God Bless rent control) that is so full of stuff that there were pathways to get through and around it all. My mom and two friends have spent the last month in there packing, and it's still not all packed. Mary Anne will probably never live alone again, and my mom says even if she does she'll never be able climb the two flights of stairs to that apartment so moving her out would have happened eventually anyway.

Of course I will help. Of course I will visit. There are a million things I'd rather do, because the emotion in this situation is so heavy that all I want to do is run from it. This situation makes me sad, and angry, and afraid to grow old. Her life and her situation are things I won't even try to understand. But I can't make my mom do this on her own. I can't not be there for a woman who has always been there for me. Doing things you don't always like is part of being an adult. You do them because they need to be done. And I won't let Mary Anne be just another person in that place with no one to visit her.

We just had AT&T out here looking at our dsl lines, but of course the issue we've been having didn't repeat itself while he was here. Apparently though, other people in the building are having trouble too. The tech was really cute, though possibly not the brightest light in the sky. Now, generally I would not twit someone on their geography, because mine sucks too, but I had a couple of actual "hey, I'm smart" moments, which seem to happen so rarely they needed to be shared.

The first thing- which anybody involved in technology knows- is that Tier1 tech support is crap. They're there to weed out the people who call and say "my monitor isn't working" and Tier1 asks if their monitor is turned on and that solves the problem. When I call because my dsl is totally fubar, I've already rebooted my modem, router and laptop twice before calling. I don't need Tier 1 walking me through it again. I know what Tier1 can do for me, and I know I need Tier2. I hate that I have to wade through 20-30 minutes of Tier1 before getting sent up to Tier2, who immediately say "Uh, yeah. Whoever worked on your account last set you up for dial up access. I've fixed it and you should be good to go". So anyway, last week when my boss called, he shook his head in disbelief after getting off the phone, I looked at him and said, "you were talking to Tier1. Tier1 is crap." The tech who came out today said exactly the same thing, though I'm pretty sure he didn't use the word "crap".

Secondly, he gave us a number to reach tech support here in CA rather than the 800 number that routes to India or the Philippines. My boss asked something about outsource centers and the guy's answer went like this:

Tech: We have a site in the Philippines and two in India. One in Bangladesh, uh, if that's in India... and one in Bombay, or whatever it's called now.
Me: Mumbai (Moom-bye)
Tech: Yeah, Boombai, that's it.

So yeah. Bangladesh is a country. It's close to India, but it's a country, and therefore not in India. I'm pretty sure he meant Bangalore, but I didn't say that to him.

I've written about some pretty tough stuff here. Oddly, I went through something today that somehow feels worse than all of that. I know, intellectually that some of the stuff I've gone through felt this bad or worse- but maybe this feels like it hurts more because the other times, it was me that was hurting. This time it's someone I love. I spent two hours today *begging* someone I care very deeply about not to kill himself.

I don't know that I've ever felt so helpless in my entire life. To hear someone hate themself so much. To hear someone so broken that they don't want to live anymore... I think that is the worst feeling in the world. (I think that must be why I didn't say anything to my friends when I was feeling so bad a month ago. I knew it was fleeting, and it feels awful to be the friend on the receiving end of that news.)

There was so much I wanted to say when I started this post. Now I don't know what it was. He seems okay now. But I want to take the person who did this to him and slam her head into a wall. Repeatedly. Instead I'm sitting in my den drinking a frozen vodka cocktail and feeling incredibly helpless and worried. I want to tell everyone that matters to me just how much I care. Just how wonderful I think they are. I know he knows how much he means to me- he's been an incredible friend for some years now. To know that someone could strip everything that makes him who he is in a matter of days and that there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it... That has to be the worst thing I have ever felt.

That's the thing about me. Hurt me, and I will go on. Hurt me and I will pull into myself and somehow find the strength to get through it. But hurt someone I love? Hurt someone so badly that they don't have the will to live anymore? That? Is not okay with me. I will do anything and everything I can to fix it. And when I can't, like tonight? I sit, and I think, I cry, and I pray. I don't usually drink. But tonight it just seemed necessary.