Caring for Aging Parents

The Woman to Woman Challenge this week is:

There are many women who still have one or both parents living. As our parents age and move into their 80s and 90s, they often need a family member to care for them. Are you currently the caregiver for a parent? Perhaps you are the caregiver for a beloved grandparent. What have you observed through this process and how have you worked this caregiving into your family life? What difficulties have you encountered, and how have you resolved them? What has been successful for you?

I hesitated to respond to this topic….
How could I? Why would I?
But on further reflection, I decided I did have a thing or two to say.

I never had aging parents. My mother died at age 53 and my father died at 55. Their deaths both came sudden and unexpected, snatching them away from this earth in the very same week. Although divorced for many years, living in separate towns and not having spoken for quite some time – they died within days of each other. My father’s repose came on Dec 16, 1983 and my mom died a handful of days later, on Dec 21. It was a discombultating double whammy of grief when I was just 26 years old.

While the rest of the world was singing “Deck the Halls”, cooking a fat goose and baking mince meat pies I was helping my stunned siblings plan a funeral. For many years there after Christmas lights and baking smells conjured up images of death in my mind. To this day I still cringe every time I hear the song "Silent Night."

I wasn’t part of my dad’s service. It was done and over before I was able to get a flight out of the frozen Midwest to his Arizona town. I did help my sibs scatter his ashes later. But there was never any real closure, no real goodbye.

I did attend my mother’s funeral. That service taught me to despise the ritual of open caskets. That sallow faced corpse was not my mother. But it is the last image I have in my mind of the woman who gave me birth, and the picture of it linger in my brain still.

There was so much unfinished business between my parents and me. Truth be told, they could have probably lived to be the age of Methuselah and we would more than likely never have managed to resolve the old baggage. Ours had been a volatile household, a crazy kaleidoscope of laughter and nightmares. I left home at sixteen and never looked back, having only a few strained contacts with them after that. There had been so much water under the bridge, so many senseless wounds. Still, with their deaths it became clear and final there would be no more opportunities to apologize on either side of the hurts we'd lashed out one each other. There would be no resolution, no forgiveness, no settling into peace.

So I set my jaw and trudged on through the world, trying to make whatever sense of it I could. Throughout all the changes and transitions that were to come over the ensuing years I would sometimes wonder – what would my parents think if they could see this? Would they care? Would they approve? But there was no voice to caution me, encourage me, or even to tell me to figure it out for myself. Their absence shaped me in a way all its own.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn some important lessons from them both about caregiving.

When I was about nine my father's mother came to stay with my family for a few months. I balked when I came home from school one day to discover my previously private bedroom had been totally rearranged to make room for me to share it with my bratty younger sister so that Grandma could move into her room. No one had told me this was even being considered. I simply came home to find it was a fait accompli.

Once I got over the injustice of that, I enjoyed the attention I got from my grandmother. Still, the thick undercurrents of shifting emotion in our house were palpable. But nobody ever admitted out loud how difficult the whole situation was. As a result of that silence, it was impossible to ever seek out support. Ours was a family well accustomed to wearing many masks, painting on a charade of polite pleasantries on the outside so matter what conflicts lurked down deep.

I never did learn the circumstances that led to my grandmother coming to stay with us or what precipitating her leaving, which seemed to me as abrupt and unexpected as her arrival. Maybe there was talk about it that I was not privy to. As a child I had no power or influence, so I was not considered worthy of consulting. Perhaps the conversations were not clandestine at all...maybe I was simply so self absorbed that I was oblivious. Whatever the case, those events left a strong enough impression on me that when I had my own family I was determined we would have open family councils to talk about any decisions that would affect us all.

On the other side of my family was my maternal great-grandmother, Gertrude Young Kurtz, who lived to be 103. Throughout all the years of my life she lived with my mother's parents.

Grandma Kurtz had four daughters (not counting the one who died as a child.) My grandmother’s sisters would come to visit from time to time, but seldom shared in the responsibility of caring for their aging mother. I know there was sometimes resentment over that. My grandmother sacrificed her health, strained her marriage, and gave up many life opportunities out of a sense of duty to care for her mother. There were plenty of times she wished her siblings had been willing to help share the load. More than once I heard caustic remarks about the cross my grandmother had to bear - both from her own lips and those of my mom.

There's just no way to sugar coat it. The relationships between the women in my family were thoroughly toxic. Although seemingly capable and willing to offer comfort and affection to the boys in their brood, when it came to how mothers and daughters interacted in the generations of our clan, bitterness and belittling were served up with daily bread. My great grandmother could at times be quite dreadful to my grandmother. In turn, my grandmother chopped away at my mother’s self esteem year after year. Keeping on the family tradition, my mother dished out venom of her own to me. I’ve always said that God knew what he was doing when he sent me only sons.

More than once I have wondered, had my own mother lived, would I have been willing to care for her in her old age? I honestly don’t have the answer to that.

It’s one thing to go through the complicated business of shifting roles from the dependent child to the responsible head of household with a parent who kept you safe throughout your own period of weakness and vulnerability of childhood. It’s quite a different matter to find yourself in the position of taking on responsibility for the well being of a parent who repeatedly broke your spirit or in other ways caused insidious harm.

Yet I’ve seen families do it, and some do it quite well. I've seen miracles of healing take place in the final season of an aging parent who had been beastly during their own children's growing up years.

When I lived in Washington State I worked for an Area Agency on Aging – coordinating all the caregiver training classes across six counties. I met with hundreds of women and men facing the challenge of taking care of aging parents, grandparents or other infirm relatives. Some were from strong, intact families. Others were from fractured networks of kin that had committed crimes of all kinds on each other over the years. In every case, no matter what the past history, there were both poignant challenges and rich blessings for those who stepped up to the plate of assuming the caregiver role.

Later I served as Marketing Director for a fancy retirement community with an attached assisted living facility. There I met with family members to coordinate the move in plans for those who either could not or would not continue to live with their kids. We had many long, soulful talks about their reasons for selling their homes and moving away from all that was familiar to them.

I celebrated with the ones who had visits from children and grandchildren multiple times each week. I mourned with those who were alone in the world – either because they had never had children or were estranged from the ones that they did.

I’ve given much thought to issues of aging and what our responsibility is for our failing family members.

At times I've felt it was selfish and harsh when daughters or sons were unwilling to make needed sacrifices to care for aging family members, regardless of what the past history might be. I thought it was heartless and cold to stick someone away in some paid for facility surrounded by strangers to make one's own life flow more comfortably. But over the years I've come to understand that family relationships are complicated and diverse. What works for one will not work for another. I have no room to judge someone else for what they will or won’t do in this regard.

I've watched families agonize over concerns for the safety of elderly parents who insist on continuing to live alone. Who makes the decision when an older person should give up driving? Who has the right to intercede in how the senior chooses to spend their money or if they refuse prescribed medical treatment? At what point does a person's right to live independently in any fashion he or she may like give way to their family members' worry about the older person''s ability to meet their own daily needs?

There are no simple answers.

Now that I am the matriarch of my family I begin to plan which choices I may make if the fates should rob me of my body's health or lucidity.

Would I go to live with my kids or grandkids? I think not. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. This I do know for sure - if circumstances ever do lead to that EVERY child in any household I may enter will have a chance to voice the impact it has on them.

To read what others have shared on this same topic, check the links at Lei's blog over at My Many Colored Days and / or those listed at
co-host Morning Glory's blog over at Seeds from My Garden.

And if any of this touches a cord with you - feel free to share your own thoughts and add your link to the growing number there already. Even though this writing challenge has been named "Woman to Woman" I'm sure that ALL voices who might care to enter would be more than welcome.

ON AGING

American rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard has been quoted as saying:
"Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and wrong...because sometime in your life you will have been all of these."

I like the quote. Yet in all my life I've never imagined that I would ever be old. I just couldn't picture it.

My mother died at 53. My father died at 55. I was in my early 20’s when I became an orphan. Somehow in my mind, mid fifties became a logical lifespan to me. As a young woman, those years seemed many, many miles away.

However, time has shifted and seasons have passed. I will turn 50 this October. As I am fast approaching the ages my parents were when they met death, it feels very surreal to me that I could be so close to the end of my wick. Holy Moses, I'm just BEGINNING to get this life thing figured out.

Obviously, I have no crystal ball to know how long I have to walk on this earth. I’m in reasonably good health. (But then, so were they.) One day my father was alive, hammering new shingles on his roof. He went to bed as full of piss and vinegar as ever, then woke up dead. My mother was having a surgery. It was serious, yes, but fairly routine. She never made it off the table. They say no single thing really went wrong. She just never came back again. Those events permanently marked in my mind that there are no guarantees...we can be here one day and gone the next with no preamble or warning. They also made me determined to live my life to the fullest each day with no regrets or words left unsaid, because I just never expected to have all that many of them.

When I was a little kid, I couldn't wait to be "all grown up". I would proudly tack on the "and-a-half" to my age just as soon as I could justify it. Each rite of passage of crossing over to maturity seemed like a special prize to me. Yet as I emerged into a stormy, rebellious adolescence, I began taking vast chances with my mortality, acting out in extreme ways, saying I didn't care if I lived to see thirty. Sadly, many of my compatriots from those wild and turbulent days did not. How I came through it all relatively unscathed is a mystery to me still.

My early twenties were spent in a trainwreck of chaos. At some point I reached an epiphany that allowed me to turn things around and climb out of the darkness. Gratefully, my thirties were a time of calmer, safer, saner days. There was much effort and striving, of nesting, achieving, sorting out. Life was unquestionably better then, but there was still a degree of reverberation in my emotions and my spirit as I wrestled with making my peace with the past.

It wasn't until my forties that I really felt I began to bloom.

When I hit forty an artist friend of mine created a beautiful card for me...I've still got it around here somewhere although right now I'm not sure where. On the front of the card there is a black silhouette of a woman running with delightful abandoned down the side of a very steep pointed hill. Her arms are outstretched and her hair is flying. It's a great image. The joy and satisfaction just seeps from the picture.

Then you open the card up and the inscription reads: "FINALLY! You are OVER THE HILL!"

I loved the metaphor. For me, coming of age into my forties meant being done once and for all with all the struggle to climb up the life mountain of self discovery and drive to prove myself. Days of graduate school, child rearing, entry level jobs and so many other life battles were finally behind me. I had loved raising my boys and had enjoyed my years as a stay-at-home mom. But I welcomed this new time when I could fully participate in the world in new ways.

Being "middle aged" meant I had earned the right to embrace my opinions, preferences, beliefs and desires with no apology. I never had to worry again whether others thought they were cool or legitimate. No longer burdened by other people's ideas of fashion or music, politics or housekeeping, I was done with agonizing over my path. I was comfortable in my own skin and ready to dig deep into the life I had chosen.

Because I had kids so young, both my boys were emancipated (geographically anyway). My forties were a time when I could travel freely and focus on career with new dedication. I had more time and energy to get involved in causes that mattered to me. I was more financially secure than I'd been in the past. Best of all, I could rediscover my husband as partner more than co-parent. That was a revelation to me. We had some grand adventures, a few horrible heartaches, and a lot of sweet days of bliss. I loved my 4th decade. It was a sweet, juicy time to be savored in my life.

And now the curtain is about to close on those years and I will begin a new season - my fifties. Already I am starting to see that this season will have some tough lessons. Coming to term with loss is inevitably a big part of later years. Already I'm finding I attend more funerals than weddings. There is no doubt in my mind that the next few years will bear more of them. I can see it coming as surely as the trees dropping their leaves in the fall.

My body will change...sooner or later the moon season will matter less to me; My skin will grow thin. My hair will get coarse.

And if I should live even beyond my fifties - outlasting my parents by decades or more, what then? Will I have health? Will I have enough money? Will I be a cranky old biddy or a serene matriarch? It's anybody's guess.

How will I face my next season? What will I be like as an old woman? I really can't say.

I've always maintained that it wouldn't matter how old I got, so long as I was loving, learning, and laughing along the way. But I'm pragmatic enough to recognize that days when doctor appointments and hope for a proper bowel movement take most of your energy can make savoring life a challenge for most anyone.

Many of my friends now are dealing with caring for ill, elderly parents. I never walked that path. Some days when I visit families dealing with dementia, diabetes, oncologists and proctologists, I wonder how our family would have coped. I've heard it said we never get given greater burdens than we can bear... maybe the universe knew that wasn't something for our brood to contend with. But without having crossed that bridge with a parent, I haven't a clue about how to do it for myself.

When I look into the faces of some of the elderly people I know, I see the struggle with failing bodies, failing finances, failing memories, and it causes a catch in my breath. I hope that the next ten or twenty or however many years I have will be good ones. I recognize there is bound to be pain and difficulty to be sure. That's part of life. But I'm crossing my fingers and toes and praying with all my might that my sense of self will remain strong, my ability to contribute will continue, my chance to connect in meaningful ways will keep expanding even as my vigor begins to fade.

My greatest fear in the world in terms of what I anticipate for the years to come is not death or even disability - but far more frightening, the possibility of losing my beloved. My husband is 12 years older than I and has a few health issues even now. That man is my life, my soul's very breath. I cannot imagine a world without him. I shudder to think of wearing the title of widow. So I mostly try not to think of it at all. And yet...the possibility that it may be some part of my future is something I have considered more and more in recent years, usually with dread.

In most respects, in my mind growing old means coming to terms with loss and letting go... letting go of my youth and some of my dreams. Letting go of my belief that things will keep getting better. Letting go of some of the people I've loved. I see it as a season of coming to terms with grief on a much more regular and intimate basis than the few kamikaze grenades I've had to deal with thus far.

I hope I can go into my fifties and further with some peace and pleasure. Right now I feel like a skittish swimmer standing on the edge of a pond, slowly, carefully, filled with apprehension, daring to reach across to just stick my toes in. I'm not sure what it will take to give me the confidence to just plaster a grin on my face and dive in with abandon as I did in my forties. I'm feeling cautious with myself. I am nervous about what's around the bend.

I want to hold on tight to all the love and strength and opportunity that I have in my life now. I'm not ready to give any of it up just yet. I'm like a little kid being told it's about time to go to bed, but instead of going quietly I'm desperately, defiantly pleading for just five minutes more. I'm not ready to be old.

Yet my sweet husband just laughs at my reticence. He says that rather than grow old together he will go first, blazing the trail for me, and then reach back to bring me along, showing me the ropes. Just like when we've gone hiking through snow drifts together, or bushwhacking in the deep woods...he'll cut the path to ease the way for me. The trail will be rough going in spots. But the vistas and views along the way will make the journey worthwhile. So long as I can continue to hold on to the back of his shirt, I know I'll be just fine.

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For links to what others have said in the woman-to-woman conversation on aging please visit Morning Glory of Seeds From My Garden or Lei of My Many Colored Days.