Roundup Roundup

I thought the empty house might inspire me to want to own it: Look at all this space where I could put my stuff! But it’s actually just making it look like it’s meant for someone else. For one thing, I hardly have any stuff. My table would replace the dining room table here that my sister wants; my bed would replace the camping cot. My two filing cabinets could go in the office. I’d still have three completely empty rooms, plus a huge empty basement, plus a largely empty garage, and it’s not like it would make sense to go buy a lot of stuff at age 64 that someone else will soonish have to get rid of.

I’m worried that a less active lifestyle might hasten dementia, and I’m also worried that four years of intense stress and lack of sleep have set the stage for me to end up with dementia. I would be delighted, relatively speaking, to get a cancer diagnosis (I don’t mean today, just to be clear); I fear ending up with dementia, because I don’t have a me to take charge of everything.

Today I staged all of the household hazardous waste in the garage, putting it in plastic bins that hopefully won’t be too heavy for me and my sister to move into the truck I realize we are going to have to rent. Twenty-six bins, two big red plastic gasoline containers, and three fire extinguishers, one from 1979. I joked that since the estate is paying for it, maybe instead of getting a U-Haul, we should spring for a limousine and liveried driver. We would of course want the champagne fountain and an ice sculpture of Pete Hegseth. (It’s also a joke to say “the estate” is paying for something. That just means we three heiresses are sharing the cost.)

I was dispirited to see how much Roundup we have. I think of my parents as being people who would avoid chemicals, but they weren’t. My mother drank hundreds of gallons of diet soda, even thought it says right on the bottles and cans what’s in it; her wish to lose weight (lose weight, lose weight … ) trumped any other consideration.

They are not sure what causes Parkinson’s disease, but certain toxins are thought to play a role. I thought I had read that about half of people with Parkinson’s will get dementia, but now I see something from UCSF that says 80% of people with PD will eventually have dementia. “The average time from the onset of movement problems to the development of dementia is approximately 10 years.”

So I don’t know about that. It’s hard to distinguish Lewy body dementia, which can come with Parkinson’s-like movement problems, from Parkinson’s dementia. One thought is that you can tell them apart by whether cognitive or motor symptoms arose first, but I noticed the personality changes first, whereas my sister noticed motor problems first. Certainly movement problems did not precede personality / cognitive changes by 10 years, so maybe our mother had Lewy body dementia.

Carrying bin after bin up from the basement, with my tricky knee and aching shoulder, I was just glad not to fall backward down the stairs with five gallons of Roundup sloshing over me.