Don left for Costa Rica today and for the first time, I really hated to see him go.  All that I have been reading tells me how sad and scary his life has become.  I’ve started looking back at his increasingly odd behaviors.  At some point in time he began avoiding public restrooms.  He would tell me on many occasions that  “a pain had hit his tummy” and he had to go so quickly that he had to pull the car over and run in the woods, or behind a building.  Once he even said that he jumped in a dumpster in a parking lot to relieve himself.  It wasn’t until he would do this sort of thing, when I was with him, that I realized he would pass by a public restroom and opt for some open area to soil.

 

Even if I pointed one out to him, he would say that he didn’t want to use that restroom.  As early as 1993 I can remember him having a fit if anyone flushed the toilet in the house.  He would get hysterical over how much water was being wasted, so it just became second nature to wait until Don left the house to flush the toilets.  As long as he didn’t hear it happen, he never seemed to notice.  We are on a well, so there isn’t a cost factor in flushing.

 

One of the things that I most admired about Don was his business savvy and his ability to calculate long strings of equations in his head.  Yesterday when we were discussing the cost of a fence he couldn’t do simple division or multiplication, so I gave him paper to write it down and he could not remember the symbols for multiplication and division and when I wrote them for him, he couldn’t discern between the two.  Today he asked me to go to a closing in his stead.

 

When I got there the Buyer had prepared a contract that was 10 pages full of self serving legalese, including a paragraph that said we would loan him all the money he needed to build houses at prime plus 2%, with no cap on the amount or the loan to value ratio.  He assured me that Don had already agreed to sign the document.  I called Don and explained how dangerous this would be and Don agreed that the closing should be cancelled.  The man was quite upset and said that Wendell Williams had assured him that “he could get Don to sign anything he wanted”.  It’s a good thing that these were not in Don’s name.   The builder went on to tell me that he had just gone bankrupt after losing millions of dollars and he was really counting on Don financing him in the building business.

 

I had asked Don what it was about Costa Rica that most appealed to him and he said “the people there are so stupid that it makes me look smart”.  Don can’t find his way around town anymore and that is probably why he hangs out with Wendell Williams all day.  In Costa Rica, Don is still lost, but things move so much more slowly and he doesn’t know the language so he is under no stress to even appear like he knows what is going on.  He has no desire AT ALL to learn the language and keeps telling me how wonderful it is that he can communicate using crude gestures and pantomimes.  He could not do that here without people treating him like the mental case he is, but down there it does not seem that unusual.  He is having a harder and harder time making his desires understood and the opportunity to give up speaking and just use motion is probably a great source of relief.

 

He has been very depressed lately.  He just picks at his food, he has no energy, he looks so sorrowful and says he just feels “blah”.  I suggested a doctor and a remedy and he got very defensive and said he could “cure himself with his mind”.  I argued that depression is a disease and not something that a person could will in or out of their life, but he protested stating that his mind was stronger than most peoples’ and could get rid of this bad feeling if he just didn’t have so many other things always bothering him.  I took the opportunity to ask what was bothering him and he said the Boarding House is “not doing right” and the grass needs mowing and nothing runs like it use