End of an Era...

Figured I should update now that things are actually official...
After our last placements left in 2016, we took some time for our hearts to heal.. and then we just didn't get calls about placements (ok, we did get a call occasionally, but it seemed it was always while we were out of state, either on our way to or heading home from a family funeral.. so, we weren't in a position to say yes anyway as we were always at least 2 days out..) then, a year ago, shortly before it was time for us to consider renewing our license, my mother had some medical issues.  She has MS and had severely limited mobility to start with. The MS had claimed her left foot and she couldn't support any weight on it.. and she'd fallen and broken her right foot in the past... well, last February (2019) she fell and broke that ankle again... while in the hospital for that, it was discovered that her formerly benign breast cancer had returned, this time it was super aggressive and was already fairly advanced.. Mom was also having issues with low oxygen levels and between that, the chemo and the stress of it all, there were a few times where she lapsed into a coma for a few days and we spent the whole year not sure if she was going to make it... So, we knew there was going to be a high chance I might need to travel out of state again at a moment's notice, so we decided to close our foster license. We had thought, at the time, that we might consider reapplying once things settled down, but, they never really did.. it was one thing after another with mom last year, and my sister, who had mom's medical power of attorney, just went out of her way to make things more difficult for everyone right until the end..
Mom was able to go home, finally, in December. She'd spent almost the entire year either in hospital or at a rehab facility. She had 3 surgeries on her ankle, but was never able to have it heal enough she could put weight on it, even with plates in there now. (She'd had pins in from the first break..) Her cancer proved itself resistant to any and all attempts at the chemo treatments, though most of them were interrupted by the comas... she just had really bad reactions to the chemo.. But she did get to where she could be sent home. On hospice care. Her doctors said they expected her to have a year, maybe two.. However, mom didn't survive the month and passed on December 30, 2019.
My sister continued to "be a pill" as they use to say.. and was absent from mom's funeral. She was extremely peeved that she was not also the executor of mom's estate.  She had been living with mom (My brother and his family lived right across the street.. I'm 3000 miles away...) and actually managed to utterly trash the basement floor of the house (where she'd been living).. massively disgusting.. and I honestly think that if the home health people had gone down into the lower level of the home, mom would not have been allowed back home.. she'd have had to go over to my brother's.. she had not cleaned up after her pets for YEARS.. she had 2 iguanas at one point in time... they both died _YEARS_ ago... one of them was still in the giant iguana cage she had down there.. it was bad... and I only saw pictures of what was left after she moved out.  This house was basically the only inheritance we were getting.. She also took all of mom's liquid assets, since she had access to mom's accounts.. anyway.. it's all been an extremely stressful year and it's still going...
This has all taken a toll on my health as well (and the fires that ravaged the entire state of Alaska all last summer didn't help any..) and we've come to realize that a few of my health issues are now deteriorating faster then we'd hoped (though I still can't get some of my doctors to take things entirely seriously.. we had to switch last year because of insurance, so I'm now starting all over...) so, we've made the decision that fostering is no longer really an option for us. So we will be staying closed. I've started giving away furniture and clothes and supplies.. once I get all of those things parted out (mostly to other foster parents) I will be dropping out of all the foster parent groups I've been in.  This is still really hard for me, emotionally, but, it is really the only option right now. Some days I can barely walk, carrying a young child would be right out, and if we had older kids/teens, I fear they'd feel like we were only doing it so we'd have a caretaker for me... (I'm not to that point, though there are days where I am just not up to doing much...)
So we're back to only fostering dogs. The loss of a parent and the loss of a dream, all in one year.
Not sure what I will be doing with this blog.. I mean, not that I really did much with it anyway...