Why Sagelight was down

[sagelight]

As you may know, the website was down for quite some time. My experience during that time is a cautionary tale of dealing with dysfunctional family members, as well as the need for preparing onesself for coming into old age and how that affects both you and your family.

I will try to keep this short, although I really want to write volumes about it.

In 2016, I received a phone call my father who told me that he was concerned that my brother was gaslighting him and trying to trick him into giving him power of attorney by convincing him he was insane (he wasn't). He felt my brother was doing this in order to sell his house out from under him and put him in a home. I hadn't spoken to my father for some years, primarily because of my brother -- who, in my opinion, is a sociopath who derives pleasure from manipulating people against each other.

I was living in Hawaii at the time, but was already making plans to move to Portland, Oregon. Instead, I went to my father's place, where it was very different than my brother described. He was in poor health and in dire straights, living with almost no necessities, all the while my brother was telling me everything was fine. After looking into the issue, found that my brother was not only emotionally abusing my father, but purposely allowing my father to suffer alone at his place in the mountains. In one instance, my brother left my father without a heater during the winter where it is below 0 degrees for weeks at a time. When I asked my brother about this, he responded, "What, am I supposed to make sure Dad had a heater?" -- again, my brother was telling me everything was fine with my father.

It turned out my father was in ill health, much of which could be addressed but wasn't. After speaking with my brother and hearing excuses and lies, I realized my father was right -- my brother was, in fact, trying to get my father's money and place him in some assisted living home that would not meet his needs, and as far as I could determine, he was either making it up or finding a place so cheap and useless for my father, that he could keep the bulk of my father's money from the sale of the house.

I stepped in and started taking my father to the Veterans Administration hospitals and addressing his needs. When I showed up, my father's hair was completely white and his skin was ruddy and pale. After a few weeks, he looked normal again, was much happier and in better health.

My father was dealing with moderate dementia. He did need some care and shouldn't have been living alone as my brother had left him. As my dad's social worker had agreed, my brother was purposely letting my father suffer so that he would cry out for help, rather than helping him in is situation and being a friend and helping with even the most basic needs. It was clear that my brother was letting my father suffer so that he would sign over power of attorney.

My father could barely walk when I showed up. It turned out it was a curable problem called Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH), which required a small-level brain surgery. The NPH also causes a form of dementia (that, amazingly, is also curable to some degree), which caused my father to get headaches and to become agitated and confused when approached with too many details.

I agreed to live with my father while we worked out his medical situation.

We went to a lawyer, and the lawyer agreed that my father needed someone to protect him from my brother. He signed Power of Attorney to me, which turned out to be a very good thing to do later on.

When my brother found out, he and my sister both would call my father everyday telling him I would steal his money and they he should give power of attorney to my brother. Every day, my brother would purposely confuse , disturb, and frighten his own father who had dementia. I tried to talk to my brother about it, telling him we needed to work together for my father's best interest, but my brother would not work with the situation at all, lying to my father, his social worker, and verteran's affairs officer on many occasions.

To make a long story short, I worked very hard to get my father the things he needed, including his surgery. It was a very difficult task because my brother and sister were actively trying to turn my father against me every day -- imagine, trying to make someone in their own home scared of the only person willing to take care of him just because you want his money. Eventually, my father developed a very aggressive lymphoma, which started a new course of taking care of my father -- helping him die.

When my father was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma, my state of mind turned instantly from trying to get him cured and living with me in Oregon, to visiting him in the nursing home every day until he died. The nursing home was also a horrible situation -- the staff did not understand dementia, and he was constantly being treated in the exact manner in which you shouldn't treat people with dementia. Another long story, but I will mention the name -- Avalon nursing home in San Andreas, California. If you want lots of flies on your food and unconscious body, don't mind being put in painful and dangerous situations, try it out.


Why SagelightEditor.com went down

My father did not have Internet, and he was in a place where it was hard to get, so it was hard to keep track of the site. Between the emotional turmoil of my father's illness and a very dysfunctional family, my main goal with Sagelight was to keep the site up to date. However, since I was disconnected from my mail and not on top of things on the site, I didn't realize the site went down. It turned out my credit card had expired and I didn't update the information with the server company.

By the time I realized the site was down, I was in the middle of the situation with my father, and it became such a long process to restart the site, I had to let it go for a while and focused on my father's situation.

Sagelight is a huge undertaking, and it was already demoralizing not being able to work on it. I have been working on it for the last 3-4 months, with some neural networking applications and the work in version 5 I started before my Dad's situation took over my life. I am about 70% done with Version 5, and will talk about this in another thread.

Anyway, that's what happened. Between a sadistic, sociopathic brother and my father's long-term illness that turned terminal, and the site going down without my knowledge, I wasn't able to attend to it as I would have liked.

Rob