o/` Better Than Ezra – The Killer Inside o/`
I got an email from my sister last night. It was a reply to me emailing and asking how things have been with my father. Now I haven’t written anything about this situation in a while, so I’ll write up a little background for people who are new or just forgot..
My father is an alcoholic, he has been for decades. It was always his escape when things were going badly, and according to my Aunt Elaine he was told long ago by doctors that because of his other health problems this would kill him someday. Last year he was in and out of hospitals because, at 51, that finally seemed to be coming true. He was convinced that he’d die in a matter of months if he didn’t get help, so he was accepted into an alcoholics rehab home. Now he is out of rehab and was told by the doctors recently that the damage to his liver was too extensive for it to ever get better. He can’t get a transplant because alcoholics don’t qualify for them, so he was told that he only has a few years left to live.
Now I left home in Maine for good when I was 18 (early 2000), about 4 months after I moved out my parents got a divorced and my mother moved out, taking my youngest sister Annette with her. Heather (who was 16 and in high school at the time) stayed with my father. I was out living my life with relatives, an ex boyfriend, and then more relatives in New York, and eventually moved to Philadelphia to live with Myk in late 2001, and I’ve been here ever since. So I “abandoned” my family when there was the most turmoil. I think I would have gone crazy if I hadn’t %) The last few years at home were very difficult for me because I was *always* put in the middle of my parent’s arguments, I was the one who had to take care of things when my parents were unable to deal with it, and when I left I just wanted to get out. So sure, I was selfish and wanted to go out and try to make a relatively normal life for myself.
Fast forward to today. I’m happy in my life, things are going amazingly well, I keep in contact with my family, visit about once a year. Heather on the other hand is seems to be miserable. She is working, supporting herself, going to college full time, and now she has to “take care” of my father. In the email she sent me last night she made it clear that she was very displeased with the current arrangement. My father is now out of rehab and living in a sort of “halfway house” for alcoholic recovery people. He is on social security benefits because he is unable to work and since he is so sick my sister has been named the payee on his checks, she is responsible for handling his money. In addition to this, she is now sharing her car with him.
I don’t know what to do. I am torn between feeling some sort of “obligation” in being his daughter to go back and do something for him, and the chance that doing so would ruin the wonderful way my life has been shaping up. I guess my problem with it is that my father did this to himself. He was warned by doctors that he had to stop and he never did. He has hurt all of us for years and now he needs our help, how can I sacrifice again for him? I guess this sounds really selfish. Well then maybe I’m a bad person %)
Enough of that. I need something to get my mind off of all this.
Thanks to bj‘s suggestion, I tried xzgv. It’s a pretty basic image viewer, but *exactly* what I needed for viewing all those TIF files. This program is fast too, just click on the image name and it loads… it’s amazing, even faster than the silly windows software that it came with (granted, it IS from 1996…). I’m really glad I found something that will let me go through these images.
I never did get to figuring out why window maker was acting funny… of course, when I WANT to find out the problem it works fine, I used the laptop for 4 hours and it didn’t give me the error once! Oy.. %)
I am going to go find something to work on so I don’t feel all down about my
father’s situation. It’s a beautiful day out, maybe I’ll go outside with my laptop and relax in the sun… this is one of the days I wish I had wifi! *wanders off*