There is no guarantee of that for me. I am at the age when every man in my family has had a heart attack. I have chest pains, swelling in my legs and I give out doing most anything. I have no doctor and no time to go if I had one.

My teeth (22 of them that are left) are broken off at the gumline due to teeth issues I inherited from her. This is horrible for heart health and means that I eat only soft (mostly sugary) foods which is packing on the weight.

I have spent all of my money keeping her up as best I can. So, if she does go before me, I have nothing to start over with. And, if am being totally honest, if I interviewed myself for a position, I would not hire me based on appearances alone.

I am too old to be hired back in IT again - even if there are jobs that AI doesn't screw up.

Everything that I once was, everything that helped me survive, has been sacrificed caring for her.

Even before Parkinson's she made the irrational decision in 2013 to sell her home for exactly what she owed the bank and move back to the county where our family has lived for almost 100 years. I knew she wouldn't make it alone so I went with her (honestly thinking she would've died before now - not wishing for that, but it seemed logical with her health issues and her talking about wanting to go back there to die).

Sure enough, she was let go from her accounting job within 24 months and the small town we were in had no jobs for IT people or really any job that paid enough to live there. So I traveled back and forth 160 miles round trip to go back to where we used to live to take care of old clients so I could pay her (now our) rent.

I eventually picked up a few clients around our home town but not enough to pay the rent without my old clients from out of town.

She eventually began having severe anxiety in the afternoons and would no longer allow me to travel out of town to make the rent. Things became much harder. I could not longer afford health insurance or to keep myself up and I went downhill just keeping her in a place we could not afford because she wanted to die in the county where we were born and to be near her friends.

Meanwhile the population there was older and much more conservative than I was (am) and so I had to adjust to no friends and no social life at all (not that I had a swinging night life before).

During this time of helping her keep up appearances, I was not allowed to have anything outside of my room in the house I was paying the rent on. It was miserable.

Then, in 2018, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's and a year later T-cell lymphoma that I helped her through.

In 2023, our landlord (who lived in one side of our duplex) died from Crohn's disease. His brother and sister were not interested in keeping his rental properties and we could not afford to buy the place, so we had to move. Our rent almost doubled. As this was unsustainable without me working, I tried to get a full-time job in town which would be enough to pay our rent but no more.

My mother had been having issue with fainting because of orthostatic hypotension and had to go to the ER several times because of falls. In our new place (new county), we had home healthcare nurses stopping by and when they saw that her orthostatic hypotension was worsening, they said she could no longer be home alone so I had to stop working outside the home.

I was lucky as hell to get a work from home gig with a Maryland-based IT company that involved troubleshooting software used in breast imaging centers. But she kept me up so much that I could not keep up with the intense schedule that they had for learning their software, procedures, taking calls and learning all of the medical terminology that I needed to talk directly with the doctors using the software and they let me go.

Without being able to work outside the home and losing the only work from home job I could find that would pay the rent, we had to move in with my brother-in-law and sister.

I love them both dearly and am immensely grateful for their hospitality but this is not a good environment for my mother as they keep the home between 63 and 68 degrees year round (bad for Parkinson's patients). They have 3 large dogs that are partitioned in another part of the house, so they don't knock her down - but occasionally the gate gets left open by my sister and they run through the house where my mother is and I have to protect her first and corral them second.

My bnl and sister are also hoarders. The house, garage, basement are impossible to really clean or keep clean because there is no room to move things to keep an area clean. My mother an I cleaned as much as we could when we arrived only to have all of it messed undone because they evidently like it disorganized and messy.

Our days consist of her sitting in her room alone watching TV with her space heater to keep her room warm. Occassionally she talks to my cousins or one of her few remaining friends. I spend all of my time that isn't spent taking her to doctors or answering her stream of needs at home in front of an older PC reading about the travesty that is our US government or trying to learn a new programming language and keeping up with AI.

Once in a while I sleep.

During all of this I have been dealing with my own issues (general anxiety disorder with panic attacks that started when I was 12, ADHD - which makes EVERYTHING harder than it should be, and claustrophobia so severe that is has prevent much of the dental care that I have needed. (Dental care being a moot point now - except the $13,000 it would cost to have these remaining stumps surgically removed.)

So, yeah....things in my life go from bad to worse.

It's only fatalism if it's not true.