A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Peter got his apartment, in part because I co-signed the lease. I may not have realized exactly what I was getting into. I have a better idea now. Even so, I'm not sure I would have made any other decision; it was that or the homeless shelter, for him. We found a perfectly good little place on Craigslist. I liked the landlord.

In the time since he has proven to be completely unmotivated to find any way to look after himself financially. His efforts are desultory, at best. I wrote him a letter on paper with advice about taking his iPad to the library and using their Wi-Fi to browse Craigslist, which has a wealth of Bangor-area jobs he could do. He apparently went to the library once, was told that the lady who could help him wasn't at her desk, so he returned home and didn't try again.

Last week he had, with the help of his social worker, lined up an interview for a roadside flagging job. When I called him the next day to ask how it went: "Well, I have to take medication, you know, and it gives me cottonmouth. So I need to be drinking water all the time, and that means I have to go to the bathroom like every hour or two. And I knew they wouldn't like that." So, he didn't even bother trying.

He can't apply to the Circle-K because it requires math, and he can't do math. He can't apply at the Wal-Mart because the in-store application computer confused him. The security companies he interviewed with two months ago and felt great about haven't called him back, and my efforts to coax him to follow up haven't yielded much. He continues to flat-out refuse to even consider looking for work in either food service or mental-health assistance, the only fields he has any significant experience in. (He claims burnout.)

His wife, who lay in hospice during the move, died just days after I returned home, five weeks ago now. Being able to say "Look, my wife just died" sure is a potent thing to throw onto the table when someone who cares about you if pressing you to do something with yourself. It never fails to get me to back off, and I'm sure it has a similar effect with others in his life, too. I get the feeling he's going to keep reaching for that for some time.

I may have made a mistake with the co-signing. I have implied that I won't be able to pay his rent after two more months -- at least not using some surplus cash from mom's checking account -- but have stopped short of saying that I absolutely won't pay, since have in fact legally bound myself to cover his rent through April of next year, whenever he fails to pay. I'm grimly assuming that I'll need to.

Ricky texts me that I should be sending Peter more money. He says it's the humane thing to do. I begin to think the more humane thing to do would be to cut him off completely, insofar as I'm legally able, and force him to help himself.

I do have another lever. I've been paying for the car Ricky and Peter have been using ever since the festivities began, last year. The car and the Oakland house together hoover around $1,200 per month from my pocket. (This is before adding in Peter's rent.)

I intend to get rid of the house this year, one way or another. I was going to not think about the car until that was settled. But now, gosh. I wonder what motivation Peter might discover were I to announce that I intended to stop paying for the car past October.

If I may summarize the last eight months or so, as regards my mother:

Calling around among web resources for senior care in Bangor, I made a contact in late August with someone at EMHS (http://www.emhs.org), who very kindly agreed to act as an advocate for my mother's case. She did some magic, and suddenly my mother had an appointment lined up with a geriatric-psychology specialist at Acadia Hospital.

The next six weeks proved very busy for me, in this regard. All these things occurred, and not necessarily in this order:

• I traveled a lot between Boston and Bangor. I stopped using rental cars, instead riding a Concord bus between the cities, and commandeering the family SUV (the existence of which is a story unto itself, and for another time) while in Bangor.

• It took the psychologist about 20 minutes of conversation with her to conclude that Dorothy had Alzheimer's, stating that he didn't feel a brain-scan was necessary. I agreed. This began a regimen of monthly appointments which she continues through today; while I oversaw her first few, Ricky has been accompanying her since October.

• I did apply for the veterans' pension, and then immediately acted to disregard it. Its total amount is a pittance, especially when held against my mother's monthly cost of care, and beyond that I was told it would take a year to process. The work had been completed, so we sent it along, but then I moved on to seek other help.

• I admitted to my mother's lawyer, John Nale of Waterville, that I had chosen poorly in not seeking MaineCare -- Maine-branded Medicaid, essentially -- sooner, initially thinking it a waste of time and effort; I'd last examined it while my father was still alive, and the stresses were different then. I paid him the flat fee his office requested to take care of all my mother's legal needs for the rest of her life -- an amount that conveniently matched the remainder of her bank account, after dad's life-insurance payout -- and by god the Nale Law office flew into action.

I worked with a paralegal who stuck to my mother's case for months. I set up a shared Dropbox and stuffed it with all the documentation she requested, which took me weeks of full-time work and research, She transformed this into a petition to MaineCare, which she pushed at until it went through -- and then she kept pushing until it retroactively applied itself to cover the whole winter.

• I spent a week in Bangor at the end of September to pursue a number of errands, including winterizing the house (which, yes, did not sell during 2013). Given my change in direction regarding MaineCare, I spent some time rolling around looking at the handful of secure Alzheimer's facilities that accept MaineCare. In a bout of astounding luck, I found a one named Woodlands Senior Living of Brewer that not only was an honestly beautiful space -- they were happy to give me a tour -- but it had a room available. I called or visited other places that were gross and depressing, or full-up, or didn't accept MaineCare. To find a single case that met all three criteria (or avoided all three anti-criteria, I suppose) seemed miraculous. I immediately started to apply for my mother's residence at Woodlands.

The next day, Winterberry busted my mom for running away again. When they called to tell me that they'd checked her into a hospital and needed my advice on what to do next with her, I said "You have called at an interesting time." We arranged to transfer her from the hospital into the Alzheimer's facility, and it all worked. This was hair-whiteningly expensive for a short time -- private-pay rent there is nearly $8,000 per month -- but MaineCare kicked in presently.

And after all that I took the winter off, more or less. I dove back into work, and just swallowed the $1,200 / month in additional costs that maintaining the house and the car cost, figuring that when the snow melted I'd get back to work on getting rid of that stuff.

So that brings us to now. I am moved to update this journal, which has effectively become the journal of the period of my life I sometimes call "The Troubles" and sometimes call "The Festivities", because I am sitting on a bed in the Bangor Howard Johnson's hotel for the first time in six months. We're having an open house this coming weekend, and I feel hopeful about that, but that's not why I'm here.

I'm here because I had to bail out Peter, my middle-brother, who needed a lot of intense help in finding an apartment. He has to move immediately because he lost the qualification that allowed him to live in the low-income housing facility he and his wife have occupied for the last 12 years, because his wife recently moved out, into hospice care. Peter quit working over two years ago to care for his invalid wife full-time, sharing her disability income between them -- but tragically that source will end soon, and his legal ability to continue living in that apartment ends on May 1. Crushed at losing his wife, he vaguely planned on becoming homeless.

So I got back on the bus and found him an apartment yesterday; Ricky's gonna help him move into it tomorrow. And now I have to help him find a job in May so that he can start paying his rent by himself. I will share the letter I wrote to his social worker in my next post.

I got the official call from Winterberry Heights that they can no longer handle mom this morning. Unlike Sunbury, they're being very professional in their language choice about recent incidents, but her "elopement" attempts -- scooting out the door and down the street at every opportunity -- are unceasing, even with new medication, and she's now started to smash windows (both hers and her neighbors') in an attempt to escape and go "home", wherever that might be.

She's fine so long as someone is with her. But the staff now feels that they literally cannot turn their back on her, and they have expressed their unhappiness about this to me. I can understand that.

Winterberry is being much more helpful than Sunbury was, assisting me with finding interim solutions and possible next facilities. I am also making some calls myself. This will be the third facility she'll have lived in in a single month. I will ask them "Is there any situation at all where you might call me to say that she can't stay?" I will avoid the temptation to say "If it were socially and legally acceptable for me to gently set her adrift on an ice floe…"

This is not a good day to have job phone interviews, but I have two anyway, and a long on-site one Friday. I might just shut off my phone for that one.

Mom's taken her Ambien two nights in a row, so that's two quiet nights. Well, we can't have that, can we! So she's switched tactics to decide that I'm stealing all her money and spending it on myself (how else could I have afforded a trip to Austin?) and is now bothering the Sunbury staff with demands that they cancel her lease so that she can move "back home".

The conference started two hours ago, I am led to understand.

Sticking to Plan A: Riding the Downeaster to Brunswick, then Zipcar to Augusta. It's a nice break from the three-to-four-hour drive from Somerville. We have hotel and transportation plans booked only to cover tomorrow morning's funeral, followed by the gathering that my Aunt Jan would like to hold at a nearby hotel, plus miscellaneous day business in central Maine.

I packed several days' extra clothes, just in case I need to stay longer. Should that happen, Amy will make her way back home alone and I'll proceed to wing it, as I have been much of this month, and as I had hoped I was done with last weekend. I don't know at this time of any sure reason I'll need to do this, but I know very little right now.

It's nearly 5 PM as I sit on the train (which hello just started moving) and I still haven't heard from the hospital since our conversation this morning. And as such I have no logistics to figure out about whether or how we're going to get mom to the funeral, and nothing to pass along to Ricky. I wish I wasn't dependent upon him for this, except that I must pick up dad's urn from the funeral home just as it opens, only 60 minutes before the service starts, and then proceed directly to the cemetery. Peter trashed the car I dollar-sold him a while ago. Ricky's her only ride.

Let me tell you, every new professional meeting mom for the first time is very impressed with how deeply, deeply fucked this all is, especially since their first reaction is to invariably be charmed at this sweet old lady who loves to talk and make friends, even when the sun's down and she's off her rocker. I console myself with the fact that in less than 18 hours dad will be in the ground no matter what and so one variable will have played itself out.

Resolution: Mom's health is more important than her attendance at a ceremony. Furthermore, our hope that attending the funeral would ground her in reality is based on out-of-date information; I have reason to believe that her dementia may have causes wider and more serious than grief for her husband. Therefore, unless I am told otherwise by the medical professionals caring for her, I'm going to assume that she won't be able to attend tomorrow morning.

Mom fell in her apt last night and got two minor cuts on her head; went to hospital. Doctor subsequently alarmed at the level of dementia she showed, and relayed to me that the retirement home manager he spoke with essentially said "She's with you? Awesome. Don't bring her back." So she stayed at the hospital overnight.

Doctor let me speak with her in an attempt to get her to calm down. She wanted to know why I spent so much time helping other people, but when it came to my own mother, I just completely ignored her?

She may or may not be literally homeless now. I'm not calling anyone until I finish drinking this coffee.

Dad's funeral is tomorrow.

Here is an obituary I wrote: http://blog.jmac.org/blog/2013/05/16/an-obituary/

What follows is some stuff I typed into a chatroom today. I'm still in the same hour-by-hour crisis I've been in since Monday of last week. I'm in a coffee shop in Waterville as I type this with no clear idea where I'm sleeping tonight.

Things are dire here; nothing is stable until mom is safe in a home. I keep thinking they're stable and then something else blows up. (It's ricky half the time.)
I am shifting my stance to getting her moved the hell out and damn the cost.
I'll figure out how to pay for it later.

Today Ricky decided he doesn't want to drive the car anymore because he isn't insured. "I'll get arrested and go to jail!"

Yesterday it was the plumbing. Tomorrow it'll be Ricky's missed the bus or some other damn thing.

I feel better for having come to this decision

More background: I was under the misimpression that getting mom into a home on the dole would be a matter of waiting a few days for forms to process. This is true except for the "a few days" part.

I'm now being told this may take weeks or more to find a bed in a facility that accepts MaineCare (as opposed to private pay)

And I'm in continual crisis mode until mom's moved. Which is a huge drain on my money, my psyche, and my relationship hi amy.

So I can't stay in this mode; i was hoping as recently as this morning that we could tread water with ricky's help but that's a fantasy

also I straight-up can't work, or do anything else
except take care of a crazy old woman who literally cannot appreciate it
that's kind of a shit trade, for me

Dad is halfway through a two-months-to-live prognosis handed to him quite frankly from a cancer center. He's being tended to daily by home hospice care, who are awesome. Amy and I met them by chance three weeks ago, when they were on the verge of calling Adult Protective Services because both my parents had stopped bathing or eating or changing their clothes or otherwise acknowledging external reality without outside assistance, and they had failed to volunteer that they had any children. But there I stood! And this is how I've come to inherit many troubles at the moment.

My parents' self-neglect is due less to despair and more due to dad being very sick and weak and mom sinking ever deeper into dementia, a condition that started to get serious when in winter 2011 they traded their big town-centric Fairfield apartment building for a drafty shack at the end of a dirt road in Oakland, miles from anything.

Why they did this is a mystery; I suspect that they got bilked by someone taking advantage of the fact that dad's energy level had finally dropped beneath the level required to keep mom's batty irrationality (a lifelong core personality trait) in check. I don't expect we'll ever quite know. But their moving into that awful space was the moment that their age -- over 80, by this time -- caught up with them.

Mom's mind began to drift in earnest, and is now permanently stuck in a state where, at best, she thinks they still own the apartment building and are just staying in the shack for a few days as a getaway. Or she thinks that they own all the other little summer shacks around the nearby lake, and refers to the people there as their tenants; there is a whole cast of other tenants she makes up stories about, sometimes involving noisy people who live on the second floor. (They do not have a second floor.)

At worst, she thinks dad is her stepfather and calls me for help to take her to a shelter for runaway girls. That was the state she was in the morning that we ran into the social workers by chance; my parents were hungry, dehydrated and filthy, which couldn't have helped. Mom wandered back into the present when I gave her some coffee, and we've since got folks to help with groceries and meal preparation and bathing and so on. APS is being kept at bay, but they're aware of the situation and prepared to intervene if we can't find a home-care situation that keeps my parents from being a danger to themselves and possibly to others. (Dad, weaker every day, keeps driving around, though he often falls down in the driveway and has to crawl back into the house. I'm not there to take the keys away. Ricky tried and got shouted down. The last time I visited, last week, mom locked the door while dad was outside and couldn't figure out how to unlock it; by chance I had the back door open. Neither of them are good at using their strange modern telephone, so one can't call them to check in.)

I'm paying for all this myself. I secured power of attorney last friday at an at-home meeting among my parents, a hospice social worker, and my parents' lawyer, who is also awesome. I am as I write this engaged full-time in trying to suss out their core financial information, then contacting various institutions and trying to convince them that I have authority to access all of my parents' stuff, and furthermore that time is of the essence -- I am trying my hardest to set mom up with the financial aid that will allow her to live in an assisted-living facility for the rest of her life the moment dad is gone, and there are only weeks-if-not-days left to do this. They are riding off my credit card for the nonce, and depending upon what I discover in their bank and credit-card accounts I might be able to reimburse myself, or even allow them to pay for their own care, but I'm not betting on much. But more to the point, a prerequisite to obtaining elder-care financial aid in Maine is knowledge of said elder's assets, and the lawyer knows exactly what legal-financial kung-fu to perform to tidy things up once I get those magic numbers.

The lawyer was very surprised and sad to hear of their rapid decline, starting with the ill-advised home sale, which was news to him. The last time he saw them, only a couple of years ago, they struck him as "young elders", to use his words. I would have agreed. They have fallen apart so fast since then, and I suppose that the undetected and untreated cancer sapping dad's strength, assertiveness, and ability to complement and counter mom's batshittery played a primary role here.

Ricky, disappointingly, presents another obstacle, one active as I write this. For years he's been frequently busing between his home in Bangor and my parents' place to help them out, a few days at a time, even though he and our mother get along with one another so poorly. (I didn't realize until Amy pointed out only yesterday that they possess very similar forms of crazy. By god, it's true, and no wonder they can't stand each other.) Dad would always give him rides to and from the bus station. But now dad can't drive very well any more, so when Ricky (due to a miscommunication) raced to the shack on Saturday, he found himself stuck there. He's not very good at communicating with the taxi service, and refuses rides from the home health-care folk in the house, whom he views with distrust. He also refuses my suggestion to solve two problems at once by driving dad's car to Bangor and keeping it there. (He asked mom if he could. She said no. So that's that.)

In the meantime, he's stuck in a one-room house with my mother, bored and angry. I received complaints yesterday that he's been frightening the home-care workers and even sending them home. (When I ask him about this, he blames mom.) I'm not sure what to do about this, especially given that even if I make the three-hour drive up to Oakland to give him the one-hour ride to Bangor -- which I am seriously, deliriously considering -- there's no practical way to prevent him from just busing back and getting stuck again the next time he feels it necessary.

I've apologized to the home-care folks for Ricky and they've insisted that I've nothing to apologize for, but his appearance is the latest in a one-thing-after-another litany of obstacles that keeps APS present, waiting to intervene and just take my parents away anyway. I've made in clear in writing that if the hospice decides that this last resort becomes the best option for all involved, then so be it.

I'm horrified at the thought of the funeral, mainly because I literally cannot imagine how mom will even manage to dress herself for it, let alone how she'll act at the actual service; she tells me over the phone that dad's got a real bad cold, you know, from the move, but he's getting better. Ricky's going to end up forever furious at me for not burying dad with full (expensive, tacky, and disrespectful) military honors, which Ricky's been insisting on, and I've been quietly ignoring. (Dad served in the Air Force for a few years as a kid, but it's not part of his identity or personality in any significant way, unlike Ricky's deeply self-ingrained army service.) Don't even ask me about Peter.

I'm not very close to my parents. I've only relatively recently come to compare notes with my grown-up friends and realize that my childhood-thorugh-young-adulthood was really quite fucked up in some fairly unique ways, and I have a lot of unpacking yet to do. That they are making all this difficult to the very last is really quite in character. (Don't tell me they can't help it. Dad is very much of sound mind, knows damn well what's going on, and still resisted giving me power of attorney, to say nothing of the idea of moving them out of the house and into a place that could actually care for them better.) I am not very sad that my father is dying, and that my mother rather is as well. I am upset in the sense that this is a process filled with one frustration after another, and carry self-loathing that I didn't do anything sooner, which could have made this much easier for everyone.

This leads to the question of why I choose to take up this burden, which has caused me to all but stop working for now, and almost certainly take up a large financial debt, and possibly miss a June vacation in Austin that I was quite looking forward to. I could just cut everyone off and let APS handle it, and that might still end up happening anyway. The answer, I think, is that I'm doing this for myself. I don't want to live out my own life feeling that I cruelly just cut off my parents undeservedly at the end, that I turned my back on them. I mean, here I am right? They couldn't have done that badly for me, and they deserve some attention back when they need it.

I'm interested in doing the right thing, and making sacrifices towards that. But I suppose too I ought to set an upper limit.

---

UPDATE: I very much appreciate and am touched by everyone's kind and understanding responses, here and elsewhere. Thank you.

Only a few hours after posting this the social worker told me that the home hospice attempt was all but ready to wave the white flag. Dad's strength is inexorably fading by the day, and with nobody dependable in the house at all times, the program just can't work. Home hospice assumes the round-the-clock presence of a family member who can do simple tasks and keep an eye on things, I learned. They initially thought mom could provide this role, and after a few days saw how that clearly wasn't true. Then Ricky volunteered, and that also fell apart quickly. The folks I hired to show up daily for a few hours don't cut it, since apparently they're not legally allowed to administer medicine. (A detail that strikes me as odd, as I type, but that's what she said, twice.) So it fell back to me, she said. Could I come over right away and stay in the house for a few days, while they looked for a hospital for dad?

This is when these thoughts of upper limits immediately applied themselves. I discussed it with Amy, and called the social worker back with a frank assessment that, as she probably has observed, ours is a dysfunctional family. I wanted to do right by my family and I wanted to see that the end of their lives came with peace and dignity, and having me stay in their shack with nothing to do but build up resentment and bitterness towards each other would be a rather poor way to achieve this goal.

And being an awesome professional, which she is, she understood exactly where I was going as soon as I started talking (but let me air it all out anyway), so we agreed on an alternative: I'm going to go on up to Waterville for a week, staying in a hotel that's only a few minutes away from their house, rather than a few hours, and will plan to drop in often, and otherwise be on-call, while the professionals continue to work things out. I'm going up tonight, accompanied (for a few days) by Amy. Enterprise Rent-A-Car, who is also awesome, gave me a nice rate on a nice car and said that I could just drop it at any Enterprise in Maine… so that provides an opportunity to commandeer dad's car out of danger, at least. (Among the things that Power of Attorney allows me, thankfully.)

In the last few years I have settled on what I can't help but feel is the inarguably most elegant way to resolve time travel when used as a plot device, particularly in regards to in-story concerns over "temporal paradoxes". These ideas synthesize descriptions seen in works like Greg Benford's Timescape and the film Primer, which, as I think their implications though, strike me as so overwhelmingly satisfying that I can hardly stomach any other flavor of time-travel magic. (I can make exceptions for implementations appearing in the service of worthwhile artistic effect, such as in the film 12 Monkeys or Charlie Stross's novella Palimpsest, but these are rare.)

Basically: Travelling to the past forks the universe at whatever point you re-enter. For this to work, we must assume that the many-worlds interpretation is essentially true. Since that theory is at least as plausible as the notion that you can send something as big and complex as a living human to a particular point in the past, I have no problem starting with this assumption.

Let's say I'm standing beside you in your lab, as you prepare to press the button that will send you back in time 100 years. You have an agenda in mind, and when it's complete you will use another miraculous device to bring you back into the lab. You press the button and you vanish. From my point of view, you never return. As far as I am (and the rest of the world is) concerned, you simply disintegrated.

I cannot pick up a textbook to discover that, say, World War II never happened, nor will my memories get overwritten to match reality however you intended monkey around with it. The world objectively remains exactly as you left it. Soon enough we must reluctantly come to accept you as dead, and life goes on for the rest of us.

From your point of view, you pop successfully into whatever place you wanted to occupy 100 years ago: success! (Let us handwave away how you're able to appear on the surface of wherever the Earth was located within the cosmos 100 years ago, with your personal velocity adjusted to match the planet's rotation and movement through space and all that stuff, to say nothing of how you can push aside your volume of matter as you arrive without disaster. These magics are all part of the unfathomable-science package that allows you to travel in the first place.) You are now free to do whatever you want, without worry of "temporal paradox". Kill your grandfather! Bribe the art academy to let young Adolf enroll after all! Go nuts tearing up as much of the early 20th century as you can, and observe as reality doesn't fall apart, nor does the family portrait in your pocket fade away one sibling at a time, or anything like that.

This is all possible because at the moment you blinked into existence here, the universe split in two -- just as, according to our basic assumption, it probably does all the time anyway. The "trunk" of this split leads to a future where you, 100 years later, press the button in your lab. The "branch" contains a different set of futures entirely, all which account for whatever mischief you have in mind. No matter what you do, your actions are forever sealed off in the reality-sandbox you created through your travel. You cannot in any way effect the "trunk" timeline that I inhabit and observe.

And woe be unto you if you are so foolish to actually flip that switch on your utility belt to bring you back to the lab! While your adventures did not destroy the future I inhabit, they almost certainly did change the future from your new perspective, and who knows what will exist at the space-time vector that you departed from? Perhaps it'll be your lab, with me waiting there -- this would require both you and I and most of the people we know to be born exactly as happened back in the "trunk", and then follow the same intersecting life-paths, note for note, until the moment you pressed the button. But given all the trouble you caused, that seems unlikely to me. More likely is that you won't recognize the place you pop back into, nor any of the people there, and that's assuming that the spot of your original vanishing in the "trunk" isn't occupied by a thick concrete slab or something in your new future -- ouch.

It's an open question whether the nigh-magic involved in future-directional time travel just blindly bumps you down one path of the branching future, like a ball dropped down a pinboard, or whether it causes an identical iteration of you to emerge into 100 years' worth of branched futures simultaneously. Either way, I don't think you-or-y'all will be in for a good time.

Let's take this another way: you have a more benign experiment in mind. You'll press the button and travel only 10 minutes into the past, and your destination will be the middle of the Sahara. Nothing you can do there can possibly affect the course of human civilization at all, especially in such a short amount of time. Again, you vanish, and again, from my point of view, you are gone forever. From your point of view, you pop open a bottle of water and pass the time, admiring the desolation. Then you flip your belt-switch.

Pop! Here you are back at the lab, with me still rubbing my dazzled eyes from your departure. But that iteration of me is a wholly different one than the one in the time-branch that you left behind. You're still in the separate time-branch that you entered the moment you appeared in the desert. But in that branch, back in your lab, I was helping you fasten your wondrous time-belt apparatus, ten minutes before you pressed the button, and nothing you could do in the Sahara could prevent that future from playing out.

So what happened to the you in your new side-branch? Well, they also zapped themselves into the Sahara, creating another branch. Which will create another, and… yes, a whole lot of recursive side-branching happens there. It goes quite deep, but not infinitely; eventually, along the line, something happens -- perhaps a disaster, perhaps merely a change of mind -- that causes a you-iteration to not travel to the desert. And in that world, a time-traveler iteration of you still appears in the lab, water bottle in hand, and if that means that world now has two of you in the same room, goggling at one another, so be it. There's still no "time paradoxes" at any point in the process.

Interestingly, in this latter experiment, from most of my perspective your time-travel jaunt is a complete success, just like in the movies. I see you vanish, and just as quickly re-appear with a pailful of Sahara sand as proof of your travel. But for that one version of me in the "trunk" timeline where you "first" pressed the button, you vanished for good.

I could use some advice, or even just other points of view, regarding my parents. They both turned 80 last year, and have lately made certain ill-advised lifestyle decisions. My siblings are in no position to help, and distant family is distant. If any family is going to help them, it falls to me. And I'm not sure what I should do.

Executive summary:

Contrary to agreed-on plans to sell their apartment house at a fair value and move permanently to Florida, they dumped it and bought another house. Both they and the new house look awful, and I begin to worry for their well-being. I have no knowledge or experience in caring for elderly but willful parents. Any thoughts or advice would be most welcome.

More details:

As far as I knew, my parents' plan for a goodly while involved selling their apartment building in Fairfield, Maine, where they have landlorded since 2000, and then permanently retiring to Florida. I actively helped insofar as I connected them with a local realtor, and helped them assemble a collection of property photographs. That this was their last adventure in cold New England was never in doubt.

But then, over the winter holidays, they decided essentially overnight to dump the house for a pittance, and immediately buy another, tiny house in nearby Oakland. By the time I learned about this, everything was already in motion, and I felt more resigned about it than moved to somehow intervene. They moved at the start of this month.

Amy and I visited them last weekend. It's pretty awful. The house lies on a lakeshore and the view is nice, but to get there one must barge through a hilly, unpaved road, the valleys of which were filled with tire-slogging mud that day even though it hadn't rained lately. The building itself is a mess; a cottage, basically, stuffed haphazardly with their things, boxes stacked high, inside and out. One bathroom wall doesn't quite reach the ceiling. The house has no basement, and one corner of the building's exterior rests atop on a wooden stilt which itself stands without any apparent fixture on a concrete slab.

My parents don't look well. Amy and I found their appearance and behavior shocking, as if they'd aged ten years or more since we last saw them. During our visit my mom never put pants on over her long johns, and I was sad to see that her dentures were falling apart, giving her several prominently missing (false) teeth. My dad didn't even bother putting in his own teeth, and despite being genuinely overjoyed to see us, fell asleep partway into our short stay. The lunch mom served us took the form of plates of gray meat and stale bread, with condiments ranging from flavored applesauce to shrink-wrapped fajita vegetables. The plates were full of water. Nobody knew why.

It did rain as we sped back home on I-95 the next day. This put Amy into the mind of wondering what that road's like now, and how able my father is to navigate it; he's had one car accident so far earlier this year, before the move, and mom doesn't drive.

I haven't thought about it much because they're far away, and caring for the elderly had never ranked large on my family's priorities. I had only one grandparent whose lifetime overlapped with my own, and to the best of my knowledge she simply lived in her own house until she died one day; however that happened, it was 20 years ago, and my parents didn't seem especially involved. Similarly, while my parents have set up legal structures to give me power of attorney in the event of their own passing, the only plans they had for their sunset years amounted to "go someplace warm". I was willing to trust them to see that through, because of their love for Florida, which they do still manage to visit annually. But here now they've messed it up.

They get along because their will still burns so brightly, and they have no problem finding people to help them; their little property was littered with tools and equipment from whatever dudes they have over during the week to fix things up. But I think they may have gone too far this time. This location's terrain is poor to the point of treacherous, and makes me worry about what sort of property they intend to buy in Florida, to say nothing of them undertaking the whole adventure of house-hunting all the way down there.

Before this visit, I was of a mind that their life is their own, no matter how old and, alas, age-infirm they are. There are few activities they love more than buying and selling houses — this has been true my whole life — and if that's how they want to spend all their days to the very last, maybe I should let them. But this last visit really broke my heart away from hardening like this, especially with Amy there to provide an objective view about how quite dreadful the whole situation looked.

So here I am, honestly unsure what, if anything, I ought to do. Ricky and Peter and Janice all exist, but they all carry burdens of their own and can't help in any ways other than the most short-term; none can assist with deeper plans or ideas. With my dad mostly tuned out, mom's gregarious battiness drives my parents' path, and it kind of stinks, but it's what they've chosen. I don't wish to treat them like children, or something. And otherwise I don't have much sense for what's appropriate, since lack of grandparents or extended family means that this just isn't something I've been exposed to before.

I would deeply appreciate any thoughts or insight from those wiser than me on this matter.