Declaration of Lost Dependence

photo by Travis Essinger

This is strange to say but one of the greatest losses I've experienced is my loss of dependence in financial matters.  This was also the site of a few of our greatest struggles.

You see, Will was a depression-era baby and has always gripped a dime until a tear appeared in Roosevelt’s eye while I am a boomer often given to a certain profligacy.  Fortunately over the years I learned how to save money and developed a developed a strong discomfort with debt.

In our early years he supported me through school as well as during my first major depressive break.  It was not until our partial separation when I hit thirty that I learned to manage my own money with any intelligence.  After I got my job in Bend and he figured out that I wasn’t going to quit or be fired, he decided to take early retirement.  In fall of 1989 he came up for a five-day weekend during which he house shopped, narrowed the options, and then went around with me and we chose the house we still inhabit.  He paid cash for it – a scant $107 grand.  (Yes, he’d managed to save that much on the small salary of a state university prof from Idaho.)  He moved here in fall of 1990.

After we resumed our year-round relationship we made an agreement:  we would divide the household expenses evenly and then he would add on a certain amount of my cost of the house as well as a part of the $9 thousand I’d borrowed from him while I was in graduate school.  He didn’t add on interest to either of these loans!  (A sure sign of his affection!)  Thus, every month I would get a carefully calculated bill written out on legal pad paper and I would write him a check from my checking account.  We kept our personal funds separate and I was more than happy with things as they were.  I hadn’t had a math class since high school and didn’t like messing about with money. 

I don’t remember when I stopped receiving those monthly bills.  It was probably shortly after I paid off my half of the house.   I don’t even remember if it bothered me at the time as I was a department chair and dealing with bullshit every fucking day.  Nor do I now remember when he started forgetting to pay the household bills of phone, power, heat.  I wound up putting most of them on automatic payment.  He didn’t want the garbage bill automatic because there were some weeks when he decided that we didn’t have enough for them to make a pick up and he would call in to cancel on occasion.  Then he didn’t pay those bills and I put that on automatic.

Then he made the error with the taxes that got us audited.  During a long, terrible phone call with an IRS agent who had said she was coming to Bend and then refused to come down and instead kept us on a phone call, he started talking in a Southern accent.  A few months later when I told a psychologist colleague about his strange change of accent, she said, “Do you think he had a stroke?”  I still wasn’t thinking about dementia at that point.

So we started having accountants do the taxes.  For three years he found fault with them each year.  Then I learned to do the taxes and made mistakes for two years, once in our favor, once in the government’s favor.  During that time, in 2014, there was a truly terrible day when he went over and over and over the list of deductions that I’d made and typed up – writing them out on yellow sheet after yellow sheet, working for over two hours on what I’d already finished.

Finally, we found our most excellent accountant whom we still use:  Excellence in Taxes.

There was also a horrible struggle over getting a new washing machine that wasn't resolved until the day the old one broke and spilled water all over the floor of its basement room.  In a future post I'll write more about the trajectory of the dementia -- about how it was far more difficult to manage in the beginning than it is now.

But this post is about grieving for my own losses, not his. 

I grieve that when I do the food shopping and spend $80 he hands me a $20 bill and thinks it’s enough.

I grieve that he has forgotten when it’s tax time.

I grieve that I no longer even show him the tax forms.

I grieved when I cut up his credit cards and he didn’t notice.

I grieved when I got a notice that he hadn’t done anything with a bank account and the money might be turned over to the state.

I grieve when he doesn’t buy a card or present for my birthday or Christmas because he probably doesn’t know the dates (he’s not only lost the ability to use money, he is also unstuck in time).

I grieve for my lost dependence on a man who cared for me for over 40 years.