## 251204: D stands for many things: December, Dilaudid, Dividends,
     Docusign, Dumbass, but so far not Death...

The retirement facility has been going *nutsoid* with putting up Christmas
trees everywhere.  They don't just haul assembled ones out of closets, they
set up *big* (mostly) artificial-tree frameworks and then painstakingly
hand-trim them with dense arrays of decorations and lights.  Staff from all
the different areas pitch in and work on this in their odd moments between
normal tasks.

Mom's sort of in and out with respect to lucidity, as they've upped her dose
of Dilaudid to 6 milligrams every 4 hours or so, nominally on an "as needed"
basis but it's been pretty consistent, aka she's high as a kite most of the
time.  At some point the staff and/or the Hospice affiliates were asking her
what day it was, what month or year we were in -- she only got it half right,
and didn't seem to care.  At this point she's basically unable to parse
something as simple as a meal menu and circle items she might want to eat
the next day.  Even if she doesn't pick anything, Florida *law* requires that
the facility bring her a balanced meal with that mealtime's default items,
and they're adding extra vanilla ice cream as that's still what she's
primarily eating.  Whatever doesn't get consumed (by her or me if I'm around!)
simply gets thrown out, so yeah, a place like this wastes an awful lot of food.
Technically I'm probably not supposed to help with finishing her dinner but
the staff doesn't care about any of that, and they all know that it's better
than simply being tossed.

I needed to be with her in the same room on the same phonecall to try and take
care of some financials; one of the investment houses we deal with is Vanguard,
which had forcibly changed her trust account to the new configuration called
"brokerage".  More like just "broke", as it makes everything more confusing.
Now, I've been managing all that stuff for a few years now, and have an online
profile that has access to her (or our, really) trust as well as my own account
I've had for years with them.  But as the non-*primary* account holder, e.g.
not the grantor of the trust, I was not able to complete the "migration"
online.  Mom didn't have her own online setup, having been instructed long
since to never do anything financial on the computer.  I tried to set up
another profile in her name, and kept just hitting a page that simply said
"give us a call".  And of course their support people wanted to hear a male
and a female voice on such a call, even though I had *all* the details of
the account and could have finished the job on my own if they'd accept her
unavailability.  The process also demanded another cycle of uploading all the
relevant trust-establishment documents (which they already had in full-color
PDF).  Now, why the F couldn't Vanguard's IT people arrange to simply migrate
all the info that *we already had on file* to whatever new system they were
building??  Nobody's been able to answer that question.

Worse, it turned out that the way they'd designed the migration process on
the website was *super*-confusing, so one morning sitting by Mom's bedside
with my phone on speaker so we could both talk, I still needed a lot of
handholding from the Vanguard rep to try and get through it.  *He* found out
just how badly designed it had been, as I kept asking him "okay, I don't know
what this choice means, what do I need to put here?" and the like.  And then
finally the whole process called out to Docusign, creating a form with all the
made choices, except that none of the "signature" blocks were fillable.  And
that persisted no matter what I did in my browser to try and drop any and all
restrictions I normally run with -- all I was able to do was print what we had
so far to a PDF and then paper, and then I had to take this big pack of paper
back over to Mom the next day and get her to *try* and sign her space as a
trustee [barely recognizable, she's gotten so weak and uncoordinated] and
haul it all to the post office.  *Fuck* Docusign sideways, I've had nothing
but trouble with them over the years.

On a more extended-family front, I got in touch with one of Mom's cousins via
email, after several years of non-communication after Covid hit, and she
turned out to still be alive and still living near Scranton PA.  Since moving
to electric-only travel I wasn't able to take my usual I-84 to I-81 route
through there until just recently, so there was no convenient opportunity to
visit for a few years.  Before that, I had visited her a few times on the
Florida runs and overnighted in her guest room; even helped shovel out her
driveway one snowy morning before either of us could get out to the roads.
Anyway, to reply to her reply I composed a joint email from me and Mom, but
when I handed Mom the laptop to type in her bit, it took her about an hour and
a half to compose three lines worth of message.  That was pretty painful to
watch, and she insisted on trying to get through it without help or having me
type in what she wanted to say.  So her ability to navigate on a computer is
clearly shot, and it takes her a very long time to parse anything she tries
to read.  I'm not sure if that's just the opiates or if her brain is actually
starting to go.

Some instincts are still present and strong, though -- she's always been a bit
of a neat-freak, and any small bit of cruft spotted where it shouldn't be has
led to an immediate mandate to get rid of it.  So while incoherently mumbling,
she was semi-obsessing over getting little crumbs from some crackers off of
her bed table.

She also still has an appreciation for our natural world, or universe.  Tonight
(Dec 4) was the peak full "supermoon" of December, and I asked the nursing
staff if we could get her into a wheelchair and I could take her outside for a
bit to go look at it shortly after sunset.  They were like "sure, great idea!"
I brought over one of her jackets, they got her into that and loaded her into
the chair and handed off to me, saying "enjoy!" ... well, it turned into
kind of a grand adventure, as we went out well beyond the facility entrance --
there's a retention pond a little north of there where some residents do
model-sailboat racing, and they've built a nice pavilion next to the water
just to host that.  It was a beautiful night, and Mom and I just sat there
for like 20 minutes appreciating the moon and the reflection in the water and
just chatting about our shared past.  Somehow I didn't start bawling on the
spot, but I guess I was thinking more of the practical matter of how we were
doing this.  And we didn't just go back to her room after that, we took quite
a long loop around some of the campus, parts of the route that she'd do on her
"rollator" in healthier times.  We weren't too far from her original house,
either, although we didn't visit that at the time.  Maybe another day I'll
bring her over here so she can see her familiar living environment [and the
somewhat mess I've made of it since arriving and taking it off the houskeeping
staff's rotation list].

I've been pulling some of her stuff out of where it's stored, but haven't
really started sorting things into piles yet.  Said piles will be more or less
to donate, to bring home with me, to maybe put in temporary storage down here,
to throw out, etc.  I will clearly keep at least one copy of every book she's
written, and the knitwares, and maybe a little bit of kitchen stuff.  I don't
really want any of her furniture, so hopefully Goodwill can eventually make
use of that; most of this selection/sorting process will be about relatively
small stuff.  I'm glad we got kind of a head start on that in 2022.  For the
past 3 years, anticipating this time, I've had a batch of large empty crates
and boxes stashed away in her garage, so that'll make packing for shipment
quite a bit easier.

So at this point it's just a waiting game.  There's no guarantee that I'll
be with her at the moment of passing or that she'd even recognize that I was
there if so, but we can still kind of hope for that.