A Dusting of Snow at Colorado National Monument
The last few years have been unlike anything I imagined they would be. When I moved to Colorado’s western slope, I had every intention of starting a business of travel photography, that included running photo workshops, and tours. I had no reason to believe I couldn’t make that happen. I had just retired from a successful career in the field of Human Resources, and I had racked up a long string of accomplishments in my adult life. I’ve always been goal-oriented, and able to make things happen the way I wanted them to. Furthermore, I’m a relatively intelligent, hard-working, and healthy person, so I had no reason to believe that I couldn’t make this happen too.
My thought at the time was to purchase a home that I would live in, probably temporarily, as I built my business. Once I got it up and running, I could move anywhere else I had a mind to. The first order of business though, was to create income.
We had been living in a hotel room in Grand Junction and looking for a home to purchase. We put offers out on a couple of places and our offers were rejected. They weren’t bad offers, mostly full price cash offers. But it was a seller’s market at that time, and we were competing with other recent retirees who also had cash. So, then it was a matter of how much over the asking price we were willing to go, and how large our earnest money check was.
We eventually settled on the place we live now. But while we were going through this huge life change of selling our previous home where we had lived for 14 years and downsizing, my mother was living in Michigan with her sister. She had been living there for a little over a year, when I was informed by my cousin, that Mom would need to either return to Colorado, or find another place to live in any event, since her sister, my aunt, was moving to a nursing home. She had advanced dementia. Because none of my other siblings were able to help at that time, I knew the job was falling into my hands. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother and it was an honor to spend the last few years of her life with her, but I actually did have other plans.
We closed on our home in mid-December and in mid-January we went back to Denver to pick Mom up from the airport. I could tell right away that she was very frail, but I didn’t know the details of her health situation, and frankly, I don’t think anyone else did either. We set up one of the bedrooms of our home for her, and Mom came to live with us. I knew she really wanted to get her own apartment, preferably one where she could have her granddaughter stay with her, or possibly even move in, which meant at least two bedrooms, but I didn’t know if she could handle living on her own. She hadn’t lived in her own apartment in 30 years or so. I figured I’d keep her with me for a few months and keep my eye on her to see what her actual capabilities were. If it seemed like she could rent an apartment, I’d help her find a place here in town.
It was obvious from the start that she probably couldn’t handle living on her own anywhere, and after she had been with us for about six months, we got the diagnosis of dementia. They didn’t know if it was Alzheimer’s, but she had some cognitive impairment. They tested her every six months thereafter, and her cognitive abilities continued to decline.
During the following 4 years, I learned a lot about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but I found I just didn’t have the emotional or physical bandwidth to start a business. I tried to set some events and workshops up intermittently, but except for one local event early on, they never came together. The last one I set up was a rafting trip down The Colorado River. It was a one-day event. I had enough people signed up to go, but it was scheduled to take place on June 25th, and Mom had just been transferred to hospice. I knew she was about to pass at any moment. I had to cancel my one event that was set to work out. Mom passed on June 27th.
During this time, I had the odd sensation that I had somehow walked into a box canyon of a hallway, where there are doors on both sides and one at the end, but all of them were closed and locked. There were no windows. I stood at the end of this hallway and didn’t know how to proceed. In another sense, it was like playing a Monopoly game, where I had pulled the card that said, “Do Not Pass GO, Do Not Collect $200.” Eventually I knew I would need to walk back out the way I came.
Like a cat trying to fight its way out of a paper bag, I kept trying one thing or another to either make my plan come together, or to find a new plan. One Sunday afternoon, I visited a local park and ended up sliding off a cliff and knocking myself out in the process. I ended up being taken by ambulance to the emergency room of the local hospital. It’s the first time I’ve ever been knocked out in my whole life! I didn’t have any serious injuries, but I did have quite a few scrapes and bruises. Nothing broken, but just a lot of soft tissue injuries that took a couple of months for me to recover from. During my recovery phase, I decided to make use of my time by going back to travel school and then starting an at-home travel agency.
I took the travel course, passed the test, and began setting up my new business. I set up an LLC, got a city business license, and hooked myself up with a host agency. I got a website set up, opened a business checking account, and opened my doors in February of 2020. I booked a couple of trips right away, that month. Well, this seemed hopeful. Then Covid hit and it was obvious that the travel business was not going to recover any time soon. The last thing I wanted to do was throw good money after bad for the next however many months or years by maintaining a travel booking engine and so on. So, I closed that business down a month after setting it up. We’ve all heard the tales by now, of people being stranded on cruise ships and things like that. I really didn’t want to be a part of that drama.
Mom ended up moving to an assisted living place at the end of 2020. I would like to say that relieved me of my caregiving duties, and it did, temporarily. Mom was one of the first people to be able to receive the Covid vaccine. She got the first dose at the end of December and the second dose in January. I was so relieved, because it certainly didn’t seem like a good time for her to move to assisted living during Covid. Nevertheless, her living with us had become untenable as her dementia and other physical problems continued to decline. She needed to be taken care of by trained professionals.
The assisted living center was able to help her with her daily life by assisting her with things like cooking meals, helping her shower, and some of the other basic living essentials, but I still needed to be available to take her to the doctor. Her doctor’s appointments became more frequent in the last 18 months of her life. We were seeing one doctor or another about three times a week. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for pursuing business ideas.
Fortunately, what I did have was my love of nature and photography to carry me through during these years. Even in the most hectic and troubling periods, I was able to get out about once a week to spend time being healed by the wild places. Grand Junction is a nice little town, but the main reason I moved out here was to surround myself with the beauty of the high desert on The Colorado Plateau in the winter, and the Colorado Rocky Mountain wildflowers in the summer. If not for taking my weekly nature and photography respite, I may have lost my mind. My husband John usually goes with me when I do this, but he’s not much of a hiker, so I often spend a couple of hours hiking alone on slickrock trails over high desert mesas or through forests of pine and aspen, with only the fragrance of the earth and sage brush filling my senses. While doing this, I can put everything else in my life aside, if only briefly. It’s a breath of fresh air in more than one way.
Some of the people I know in real life, and not just online, no doubt wonder about me, and why I make myself so scarce these days. For most people I would imagine, when confronted with difficult or stressful situations, their go-to response is to seek out the company of others. It’s hard for them to imagine anyone who wouldn’t do that, but I know that there are other people who are like me as well – they retreat to a quiet place to lick their wounds sufficiently before re-entering the social sphere. Mourning, specifically, is a thing that is unique to each person who experiences it. There may be similarities to what others have experienced, but everyone needs to handle it in their own way. Until now, I haven’t felt any desire whatsoever to try and explain this to anyone, and I may not ever be able to do so effectively even if I try. I only know that Mother Nature seems to understand implicitly, what many people just don’t seem to get. So, I go to the silent places, where only the wind can be heard, and allow my grief to well up, spill out, and eventually dissipate.
In many ways, the world seems more beautiful to me now than it ever has before. It is, indeed, like the beautiful rose that you cannot pluck without being jabbed by the thorn. It is both exquisite, and bittersweet. The birth of my first grandchild two weeks after my mother passed put the exclamation point on my summer, and in some ways on my life generally. Life will go on and she proves it.
My Knees After Falling Off A Cliff
A Black Eye After Falling Off A Cliff
Yep, Life Will Go On
Adventures on Earth and Beyond 