To Momo and Maja

We were making our plans for watching the Eurovision – and when I say ‘we,’ I mean, I was telling everyone what I thought we should … even as at least one other member of the family cringed and hoped I would somehow forget about the whole affair by Saturday – when the inevitable question came up of who won last time.

I have no idea. I don’t keep track of the Eurovision in terms of who won because the songs are all pretty universally and equally horrible. For me, Eurovision is a chance to watch a car wreck of a show … and I love bad TV. But still, the question lingered, so I pointed out that there was no winner last year because the show got cancelled due to Covid-19.

“They’ll have the winner from 2019,” I said. Well, of course, my inquisitorial panel wanted to know who that might be. And again, I drew a blank. I mean, I had zero memory of who this person might be. Could the winner have been so boring?

Oh, and then I remembered, I was preoccupied in 2019. We were home, trying to juggle a life and Colin’s health care and the forever quitting nursing staff. I do remember that we managed to get Colin to sleep at a halfway decent hour that night and I do remember even having a beer or two while watching the show. I also remember that, as we came upstairs, Colin woke up and Christina then spent the rest of the night helping Momo, the nurse, trying to get him back to bed.

The next morning, after Momo left, he quit. He gave a long list of reasons about why he quit, but the one that stuck with me was the fact that he was offended because, at one point, Colin told him to sit in the corner. Bear in mind, this was a panicky 5-year-old who had probably gotten about three hours of sleep being asked to sleep in a room with a man he’d met about three days beforehand. You hope your 5-year-old doesn’t go and tell people to shut up and sit in the corner, but you also realize these were probably exceptional circumstances. But, to Momo, that was a stain against his personal reputation that wasn’t going to come out with a little Tide. He used it as a reason to quit.

I mean, by that point, we’d gotten kind of used to home health care workers quitting on us – and we’d only been doing this for six weeks. It’s odd to remember the story. It’s odd to remember that Colin was still speaking at that point. It’s beyond bizarre to think that a medical professional would just quit like that, knowing full well what we were dealing with, and deciding that the most sensible course of action was to leave us as a family holding this mess with no backup.

For a while after I started this blog, Christina encouraged me to write a kind of open letter to Momo. The time didn’t feel right. Also, to be fair, the letter would have to go to Maia, who was with us for a total of two days and was present when we had our first crisis of a quitting nurse. She took Christina aside and told her how the company providing our nursing was a mess and how we couldn’t trust them and how it would not be long until the next nurse quit on us. Then she ended her shift and quit on her way home. I don’t like to judge people, but it’s kind of hard not to think of her and wonder what makes her tick. It’s odd to think that our lives had turned into such a shambles and there were still people who looked at our situation and said “You know what? I don’t need this.” And then I write that sentence and realize it was kind of only natural for people to say “You know what? I want to be far away from this.”

But the memories keep coming. Christina ordered something from Lego this weekend and realized before the order was final that Lego still had the address of the rehab clinic in Brandenburg as our destination. That was when we were sending toys there to Colin, hoping to keep him busy. Saturday night a neighbor came over for beers and I had no intention of turning it into a depressing night, but a couple of beers in, Colin came up and, honestly, I’m just blessed to have friends who are very good listeners.

So, Momo and Maja, here’s your open letter, although I doubt you’ll ever see it (and might not be able to read English, but that’s a detail). You left us in a bind and you didn’t have the courtesy to even tell us to our faces why you were leaving us in our misery. It’s not your fault that Colin eventually died, but the fact remains that from the first day or our attempts to take care of him at home, it was clear there was a good chance he was not going to make it. He should have had as happy a life as he could have had those last few months, and we did our best, but lord, it would have been easier if we’d had nurses we could rely on.

Then again, maybe you did us a favor. Your incompetence convinced us that we needed to go to the hospice, which had its pros and cons, but it means that he died there and not here. I’m not sure what I would think of this house if he had died there. Honestly, there’s already a ton of good and bad memories here and, as it is, I consciously don’t spend a lot of time in the room where Colin spent so much time while he was sick. I wonder how I would cope with the house if this is where he had died. So, maybe you did us a favor.

But we both know you didn’t. You saw a situation and you said you couldn’t cope. And there is something to be said for knowing your limits. But, instead of making sure we had someone to catch us before you bailed, you ran as far as you could as quickly as you could. And even here, I can’t fault you entirely. There were times during the whole madness where the thought of fleeing popped into my head. But I do find enough to fault you.

Don’t worry. I don’t wish you any ill. I mean, I have an idea of where Momo lives and am even in that neighborhood from time to time, and I have wondered how I would react if I were to run into him in the street. But it’s also not as if I’m going door to door trying to find his address so I can stand outside, screaming obscenities at his window. But it’s not going to come to that. It’s just that Eurovision is coming up and it made me think of you and I wanted you to know that Colin’s dead, and as bad as that is, you made it a little worse.