Dear Family and Friends,

May this letter send you a wish for joyous holidays and a wonderful new year, and may it find you thriving now and into the future.  I often send the New Year’s letter and a review of my life over the past year, but I just don’t have the energy to even do that right now. What is occurring now and in front of me takes precedence.  I apologize ahead of time for the perhaps dower tone of this letter.

Mahalo to all of you who reached out with such sweet words about my Mom and for me.  I so appreciated it.  And no truer were your words about the lovely soul called Greta.  I was truly blessed in this lifetime to call her mother and best friend.  It is always very busy with demands after a person dies and when the grief is the strongest.  It takes so much out of you to just plod forward.  It was the hardest thing for me to get through this semester's demands that just ended this Tuesday and to do what needed to be done.

There is another reason why not many people have heard from me.  Some of you are already aware of the next part of this chapter that occurred a week after Mom died.  I brought dinner over to Dad’s house on Sunday evening and found him on the floor of his half-bathroom.  He had fallen the night before and lay there for 18 hours.  The firemen had to take off the door to reach him.  After many tests and a CT scan, it appeared that he had two infections and a blockage of the liver bile duct.  He was told that he would need surgery the next day or else die from sepsis.  So of course, he would have to go off his blood thinner, just as mom did for her surgery.  He came through with flying colors.  Even though he needed general anesthesia (which is horrible for elders), by that afternoon, he was paralyzed on the left side of his body having suffered a stroke.  His independent life was over.  He was in the hospital for one week and since then has been at a skilled nursing rehabilitation facility.  He is not progressing much, at 98+.  They want to release him.  But where is our issue?  So, these last number of weeks added another level of worry and attention to my life.  I have been with him over dinner for about 2 to 3 hours a day to assist him.  I’ve also been visiting places for him to go when he is released, securing someone to work on his house (which is a disaster zone and set in the 1980s) as a way for him to secure more money if we could rent it out to afford the skilled nursing fee of about $10,000 a month.

Just by chance, I searched recently for VA support for World War II veterans.  I was surprised when I learned of a 2022 bill in Congress that was passed called the Cleveland-Dole bill.  It just went into effect in November, and it is supposed to pay for long-term nursing care and all the co-pays and fees for the 1% of WWII veterans who are still living.  We are trying to find out the actual cost and secure referrals from his primary care doctor.  This would be great if we could find somewhere that has a VA contract that he can be released to and that is comfortable with other vets that are higher functioning.  He is still engaged, though with short-term memory loss, interested in world events, and positive in his attitude.

I am delaying my return to Hawai’i until mid-January with the hope that we can get my Dad settled by then and more of my mom’s affairs in order. I have attached a copy of our Celebration of Life invitation to honor Mom. We should have nearly 100+ in person and some Zooming in. If by chance any of you wish to Zoom in from afar, email me and I will send you the link. I hope to have more bandwidth to reach out to you individually in the not-too-distant future. I love you and wish you all well. Blessings for a lovely new year.

With aloha,

Gwen