Feeling lost

It's 2:45 Saturday afternoon. Nobody in my blogging circle (edited to add: EXCEPT FOR TECH!) has posted anything for days. Heck, neither have I, not since Wednesday. I'm missing everyone's posts.

I must say thank you to all of you who posted on my last entry. Your support has lifted my spirits and helped me shake off a lot of my insecurity about what I'm doing. Especially Teditor, I appreciate your comment very much because you are probably the one person who best understood the situation in my old place. Others know too, but you know to a greater degree about some of the worst of it.

Anyway, it's kind of a strange day. I slept very late -- some kind of an electrical anomaly shut my clock off about 9 a.m., and I was aware enough to get it reset. But then I thought "Hey, it's Saturday." And then I let my face smash back into my pillow for a while longer.

I'm really worried about my cousin, whom I referenced in the previous post. I think she is at a critical point. She needs to be in rehab, should have been in rehab before now. But she's not capable of making that decision for herself. The rest of her family is embarrassed, and I am afraid she may die of embarrassment if we can't get over it and get her the help she needs. I'm on the outside of the circle of people who should rightly make that decision for her, so I don't know how I should proceed. I wish Dr. Phil would swoop down and get her someplace where she can get these drugs out of her system. It is at the point now where she may very well lose her job of 17 years because she didn't return to work when she was supposed to. The doctor refuses to see her, and she's gone as far as to alter the doctor's statement about when she was cleared to return to work. If she loses the job, I think that will certainly seal her fate and she will lose her life as well.

Her son will turn 21 years old on Tuesday. When I was 21, I lost my father. But I still had my mother and brother. He will not. His father is in prison (at least as far as I know) for life for drug-related charges. He was raised, for most of his life, by his grandparents who live about a mile from his mother. He's chosen to live with her for the past few years. In no way is he prepared to deal with losing his mother.

My fear and sadness is that this sickness has gone on so long without resolution that the momentum to do nothing is too great to overcome. I hope not. I'm not so sure why it is we continue to listen to the patient when she refuses our offers of help. If she had appendicitis, we would take her to the emergency room no matter how much she said she didn't want to go. If she broke her leg, we'd make sure it was set. Why, then, do we allow her clouded judgment to keep us from getting the help she needs to get away from substance abuse? Of all times, this is the critical time for us NOT to listen to someone with such impaired decision-making skills.

As I said, I am afraid that her parents' embarrassment, and anger, will keep them from making the right choice. I think they are hoping that some friend will talk to her and suddenly she'll just decide to stop what she's doing because it isn't cool. Well, that won't happen. It hasn't happened in more than 21 years and there's no indication that any friend's comments will be able to overcome her addictions.

I'm going to go out into the sunshine for a while and think about this some more. There's so much going on with family. And I feel like the planet Pluto -- out on the periphery, caught up orbiting the sun but so far removed from it that I can barely see its light. Ah, yet another painful part of being without my own nuclear family.

When I come back, I'll have some good stories to tell. More stories about epiphanal living that just blow me away. It's amazing what you can learn about people in a short conversation.