Last week, Dad called me late at night sounding extremely unsettled. His sister had taken my mother to the brain doctor in Taiwan, and the scan results showed all kinds of plaque… I don’t remember what the specific medical terminology was, but it basically confirmed Alzheimer’s. The doctor recommended that she start medication immediately.

And then Dad ranted off about a whole series of things:

• Already, a week in to her stay, my brother is hardly ever home, meaning my mother is home alone for large chunks of time. Johnny has basically gone off the deep end (which happened years ago), so he spends all his free time outside of teaching hanging out with the religious cult. My mother was attending some of the group activities with him– including facilitated meditation and some stretching/exercise classes– but on days when she felt tired, he would simply go without her.
• According to Dad, J would also get mad at mom when she refused to go. Or, if she didn’t do the meditation while he was gone, he would chide her. But she simply couldn’t remember the full sequence of chants…
• Normally, it would seem NBD for mom to be home alone. However, given the latest test results, my father is extremely concerned about her safety while unsupervised. You’ve heard all those scary stories about people with Alzheimer’s forgetting about the stove being on or leaving the house and forgetting how to get back home.
• My father’s family introduced my mom to another lady who lives nearby. She started hanging out a bit with my mom, but she’s rather religious AND in sharing her Feng Shui knowledge, she immediately deemed the Taipei condo to be incorrectly laid out. She claimed the layout was the culprit for all their relationship woes with my brother. The recommended solution? Sell the condo. Yup, she did go there.
• After the doctor’s appointment, as soon as my aunt took my mom home to Johnny’s place, he told her not to take the meds. He insisted that doctors/western med will be the death of everyone! He told them to trash the meds. Now THIS is where we have a major problem. My father is a doctor, and my brother declares that doctors are scammers. Drug companies are scammers. Meanwhile, my brother is selling deer placenta supplements, and he’s in a religious cult. My dad believes those ventures to be scams. So see? Constant conflict. I mean, how are these two people possibly in the same goddamn family, right? Having done my own research, I think both of Johnny’s organizations are multilevel marketing (MLM) structures. I’m sure he genuinely believes in the effectiveness of those pills. Still, I don’t like the coercive tactics I have personally witnessed, and I won’t ignore the dangerous and deceptive nature of those kinds of organizations that rely so damn heavily on recruits.

Anyway, I tried to calm my dad down by asking questions to get to the core of what’s bugging him. On one hand, he has always been on the protective side of things, but man, he was seriously freaking out. And he kept saying that he was trying to get all his tax paperwork done so he could get back to Taiwan.

I tried my best to break shit down into smaller chunks. Here’s the thing: Taiwanese culture is extremely superstitious and religious. For an itty bitty island in Asia, there are an INSANE number of temples (over 16,000 registered) all over the place. There are more temples per capita than any other country in the world. And those temples are all built from private funds, meaning the Taiwanese drop a huge amount of dough towards religion (Buddhism or Taoism or whatever). Yes, my brother seems more brainwashed than the average person there, but I’m just saying the baseline is still way higher than what we’re used to here in the US.

Second, same goes for Feng Shui. So fine, the lady tells us to sell the house. I mean, the house belongs to mom and dad. It’s still their decision. But I think Dad just doesn’t like my mom being in the presence of “brainwashed” people. Maybe he thinks they will influence her the way they have influenced my brother…

Third, the MOST stressful aspect of this is my brother telling mom NOT to take the prescription meds. In fact, he urged her to double her dose of deer placenta, which he incidentally sells! I know, right? When my aunt asked the doctor, he was skeptical about the deer pills making a difference, but he didn’t believe they would hurt. So for now, mom is taking both.

After getting the rundown, I finally zoomed into the core thing: Dad, we can’t control other people believing in religion or feng shui or deer placenta. We can only control what we ourselves think and how we can take care of mom.

The next day, I called mom for her bday. I was prepared for complete incoherence and craziness, but oddly, she sounded better than I’d heard in a long while. She was more energetic, more lively. And after I asked her about the events she was attending, she sounded fine. She enjoys the group meditation, even if she’s not fully entrenched with the religion. In other words she participates casually but more for the interaction and exercise than for the religious aspect. And she really didn’t seem that bothered by the feng shui lady either. It was like, she was ok with disagreeing with the woman.

Finally, to my surprise, she expressed no frustration about my brother never being around. She said she is def feeling better after taking the supplements for a month, but she’ll add the prescription meds and see what happens. Totally logical!

I asked how her mood was so good, and she said she just stopped caring. Say what??? Yeah, she just doesn’t care anymore. And she doesn’t want to be going back and forth from the US to Asia anymore. She even gave the ok for me to start downsizing their stuff.

We talked a bit about my real estate work. She and my dad have dramatically changed their tune in the last several months. Whereas before, they seemed super obsessed about me attaining professional success, they now tell me to give myself time and to take care of myself.

I told my mom to keep doing her meditation and exercise, bc those activities are good for slowing the mental degradation. And then I started to cry. Mortality changes things. I think back to last November when I swore I hated her. Even a few weeks ago, when she insisted on staying back in Taiwan, I was so annoyed. But since then, the medical tests are more conclusive, and time certainly feels more finite than ever.

She told me not to cry: Life twists and turns, and we must make the best of the hand we are dealt. I was so sad thinking about the path ahead towards an inevitable end, and yet, at the same time, I felt a strange tinge of relief. I am a daughter raised by two people who spent a lifetime obsessing about fixing all that was not good enough or all that was wrong in their lives. Their tenacity is a large part of their success, but it was also a huge part of their failure to attain happiness. At long last, they are letting go. There is a phrase in Chinese that translates to “think open.” It means to let go and open your mind. After seven decades with their thoughts and emotions tied compulsively tight, those knots are finally unraveling. Life changes in an instant.