I have a deadline and not enough time to do the work.
It is the day after Thanksgiving, 2010.
You have made the 180 mile trek to my house and we had a nice holiday dinner yesterday. You are still driving at this time, and seemingly baseline, even though we had the incompetence related/ scam events in late 2009/early 2010. Still, I have changed the locks on my doors. You no longer have a key to my house - I can't trust who you are interacting with, who might manipulate you, and what risks that would give me.
I don't even know what happened that day, how our conversation suddenly deteriorated. I can't remember the details this many years later as I write this story. However, I remember that its as though you had a 2nd sense that I didn't have time to get into a hassle with you. And, you were looking for a fight.
We have been remodeling a condo for you nearby. You have the key to the new place, your future home. You are partly moved in there, in fact.
I don't have time to waste on a fight, especially not today.
I suggest that you should leave my house now, go back to your own place.
But you refuse. You continue to want to fight.
I ask you to leave, but you refuse, again and again.
Eventually, I call the police. It isn't the first time I have called the authorities about you. But it is the first time I have called the police in this location, my own home.
Soon they arrive, 2 officers, a man and a woman, in a squad car.
You tell them your complaint about me, the details which I can't remember anymore. Actually, I believe the complaint was that you had supported me through college and graduate education.
You now feel I need to pay you back , 25 years after the fact. Or, it was because you don't think that I repaid the loan on a piano I bought in 1980 (I think I did). I know you want the money to continue your delusional interactions with the scammers. It is hurtful to hear you harbor and express these negative feelings about me, related to events of my childhood.
I tell them that I had asked you to leave and that you refused. You continue to refuse.
The officers are respectful of the fact that I had asked you to go and you continue to not take it seriously. You continue to refuse to leave. Eventually they arrest you. They ask me what to do with you and I recommend theytake you to the hospital, to the hospital where I know there is psychiatry intake through the emergency room.
I sadly watch out the window.
I see my elderly father, between 2 police officers, walking to the police car. They place you inside the car, and they drive away.
*******************************
A while later the emergency room doctor calls me. She volunteers, "my mother has dementia too".
What a comfort those words were to me, that someone understood.
They keep you a few hours, but they don't have enough to hold you. Eventually they call me to come and get you.
*****************************
You are sitting in an exam room, in the Emergency room, unconcerned, as if you didn't just get escorted to the hospital by the police.
I help you check out, which includes a referral for outpatient psychiatry follow up.
We drive home in silence. As we get closer to my house, where your car is parked, I think to myself that I can't let you back in the house or the same thing is going to start up again. Its not really over.
I don't have time for this -- I have a deadline related to work, I really need to get back to work, and I can't afford more time to fight with you over nonsense.
How am I going to prevent the same thing from happening inside my house again?
I pull up in front of the house, and I tell you that I am going to drop you off, while I pull around to the back (the story doesn't even make sense to me today as I write this, I can't remember how I came up with a story to get you out of the car, thinking that things were normal).
I drive to the back , enter the back of the house, but I don't open the front door, and I don't let you back in.
You have your car keys, and a new condo to stay in , only a mile away. Its not like I am abandoning you on the street.
I can still remember how you POUNDED on the door, in a rage, once you realized I had tricked you ...... yes, it would have happened again had I let you back in.
But, eventually you go back home to your own place, and the event ends, never to recur.
********************************
Its hard to believe today, in 2015, that such terrible things happened back then in 2010. But it was all part of the process.
As we moved forward, as your mind got less clear, as you stepped lower in your brain functional abilities, we passed through phases.
At some point normal barriers and social restraints were lost.
Arrest is probably not an uncommon route to hospitalization for those in similar situations. Unfortunately, the system didn't easily accommodate to hold you there, or more importantly, to fix you. I now believe that it was impossible to fix you then. You were normal enough to be out there freely living in the world, and you were abnormal enough to get into lots of trouble.
Luckily, today the crazy mean and violent days seem to be gone forever, as you are now too forgetful to hold grudges, and you are too frail to be a physical threat.
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