Caring for Aging Parents

You're a lucky Frog, Meister. I hope your Mom lives long and prospers, and someday moves on to the next plane as bright and alert as she is today.

As for my Mom - well, I know you've heard what it's like, and don't need any details. Different caregiving deal, altogether: myself, my wife, my sister, my Dad, my kids, my nieces and nephews, my brother in law (who just lost his Dad last week) - it's watching the wheels come off, slowly but surely, in a big, unstoppable way.

In the face of all this, sometimes I feel emotion welling up in me that I didn't even know I had.

Kathie,

Kudos to you. I hope you will continue to feel this way when the real caregiving starts. Historically, the elder child is the one that gets the opportunity to do the most for mom and pop.

You should start now in creating the communication between siblings as to how each family is going to help.

Whomever the caregiver is, they are going to need SOME RELIEF from the responsibilities. Expect to give them some releif every couple of months.

iwanabe

Of course I return the unconditional love I was given. At times (like now) it can be very hard. My 98 year old parents lived with me until recently when I helped them move to an assisted living center. I was doing everything! My own life has been on hold and I have felt terribly guilty for resenting this at times. I don't have that many good years left, myself. I want to travel, to feel free to be selfish... Even with them in an assisted living center, they still guilt me into staying nearby to help them deal with doctors, shopping, banking, etc.

I was walking in the park today, trying to come up with a life plan for the next ten years. If it were not for my need to care for my parents, my plan would be entirely different -- I'd sell my house, move to a place closer to my grown children, travel...

So how do I handle the guilt? I am the only daughter; my brothers help some, but I am the one my parents rely on.

Feeling trapped...

IMHO .. don't feel "the guilt"..Your parents are in assisted living and I am assuming the brothers are close by ( ? ).

Ask them to step up and be your parents immediate advocate. I trust you could maintain close contact, even if you moved closer to your children ?

I have asked my sister to have my mom with her for 4 to 6 months a year, a winter snowbird arrangement. Gee ..Lil'sister said ..Oh my God-yes !!

Being by your children and realizing your own Golden Years is not asking too much for you !

I am sure it would be very healthy for you, to be near your children and your parents can still feel your love and know your involved ..so ask, your brothers to help, too.

Stay involved and don't feel as though only so can get the "parenting job" done ..

Regards ..BadFrog

Ah, many are not given unconditional love. I was such a one. And, I took care of my old mother anyway. It was a miserable time. I have three older sibs, and I accepted the job, and vowed I would not expect or demand anything from any of them. This was my choice, they made theirs, and it didn't have anything to do with me.

Taking care of my mother not contingent on help from anyone. It was not martyrdom, but duty. I have a lot of pride about my having looked after her while I didn't want to; I was kind when I was already overburdened; but I think you just DO it, because. Call it duty, I don't care. She needed looking after and I elected myself.

My own kid didn't get to see warmth and loveliness, or even end-of-life, Tuesdays-with-Morrie fondness; but she did get to see responsibility and inconvenience and I never punished my mother for being such a pain in the neck (nothing new), and I fought back the nausea in the bathroom, folded and unfolded that damned wheelchair too many times, and I'm no martyr.

I got loads of support – for ME -- from one sister, substantial financial assistance when needed from my brother, and the other, well, she hung the phone up on my mother once and never made contact again.

I didn't expect help, I was – and am still – grateful for the help I got, and I lost some respect for the phone-hanger-upper. It made my job harder to have to also be the shoulder that got cried upon.

I don't miss my mother at all. I do have a very deep sense of pride about what I did, and that's going to be with me forever. I didn't like her, ever, really, but I managed to provide for her what she'd been so often unable to provide for her children and that is actually highly satisfying to me.

I could have lived without it, though.

Hi Bad Frog are you sure your are not a prince? Meaning what a most wonderful thing you said about taking care of your parents. I just had to place my mother in a group home. It was getting overwhelming with my three small children and all her other responsibilities I see. Thank you though for putting your words so blantley I needed to see that. God Bless you

Adriana. I also have a group with the same subject matter.

You write as though all parents are uniformly wonderful and all adult children uniformly happy to take care of them and uniformly able to do so.

Let me tell a story which would like to be a book one day if I ever get over the exhaustion brought on by looking after my mother during her last years, raising a family with disabilities and managing to do so with some neurological impairments of my own.

My father died in 1987. They lived where they always had, and that was 3,000 miles away from all of us. My mother lived for some time, glad for the opportunity to be single and live alone for the first time in her life. She had ailments that progressed, though, and all four of her adult children flew thousands of miles to be there for surgeries, recoveries, moves to smaller quarters, etc.

We did not like her very much. She surely loved us but had been angry, bitchy, tired, depressed, beleaguered, critical and impatient with us all. We tolerated her. Barely liked her. I suppose I loved her but in a generic kind of way, and I have not one memory of wanting to be physically close to her. No, she did not abuse me. Not in any way which would produce that aversion (which some of my sibs share -- we were all verrrry sensitive, though, and she was intrusive).

And, I know for a fact she believed in doing better, but could not. I also know she had not intended to have four kids because they were beyond their resources, financial and personal, before the last one surprised them (that was me). I also know she did her best and given how hard we were to raise, I wonder that we all grew to be adults. She exercised considerable restraint.

However, this does not add up to enjoying her, or wanting to take care of her. When that time came, Guess Who stepped up to the plate? I did. The one among us all who had not gotten done with child rearing.

One of my sibs was enormously helpful, especially to me. But one came to visit, once, and ended up angrily hanging up on my mother when she didn't get (as if, at age 50-plus, she still thought she would get it) what she wanted from mom. The last one I totally understood not visiting because her treatment of that sib was what would in this day and age be called abuse.

That one, however, managed to send a lot of money to me for her when her funds ran out.

So what I had was an invalid of a bitchy old mother who was in a wheelchair with Parkinsons, could barely see due to macular degeneration, but for awhile her mind worked fairly well -- enough to know when it was my birthday and was I going to have her over with all the family? Well, one year I did, and the next I didn't. I took her out to lunch and ordered a piece of cake for her.

Mind you, I was kind to her. I did everything I could to run interference with the staff where she lived. I took her shopping for shoes she couldn't walk in (couldnt walk); I took her fresh fruit and vegetables and good ice cream. I attended the planning meetings and tried like hell to make them not shams and get some real help for her.

I took her to the neurologist and was profoundly moved when he was able to look her straight in her rheumy eyes and say, clearly and kindly, that there was nothing more he could do to help her be more comfortable, never mind more functional. She was by then hallucinating and sometimes delusional, thinking my sibs had been to visit, or she'd had an argument with the least-tolerated one, or that (and this was awful) the male attendant was gently flirting with her and maybe it would progress to something more permanent. I found that disgusting, and then pathetic. I only told her she was mistaken when an incorrect belief was disturbing to her, and she trusted me and one other person to set her straight.

She appreciated it all, I know she did. I felt appropriately proud of what I was doing because it was a thankless, unremitting responsibility and she was so self centered I knew there would be nothing coming my way from her. My husband took over a lot of the household stuff and to this day is the shopper and cook, good grief what a necessary adjustment that was.

It was the most unpleasant job I have ever had. In the meanwhile my kid was developing a neurological disorder which I had recently understood to be at the root of some of my own cognitive glitches, and the school had to be dealt with, and I never slept.

It was duty that motivated me. My mother needed someone to look after her and I elected myself. I bore no ill will toward the others, as I volunteered without agreements with them regarding contributions. But unlike the many precious stories here and many other places, it was nothing to do with gratitude, though, or love, or payback, or tenderness.

It's pretty hard to feel tender when you have dialed her number, let the phone ring 49 times while she made her way across a 16-foot room in her wheelchair, notice she finally lifted the phone up to her face upside down as evidenced by the muffled, too-quiet sound of her voice as the annoyance crept in when she could not hear me, at all. Finally getting it right, her first intelligible words were, "Where have YOU been?"

I regretted that my daughter did not get to witness me doing that job with pleasure, but finally realized that as a mother I was much more interested in her developing character than in a grandma-daughter-granddaughter dance-of-happy-happy. As that was the case, I saw the experience as a potentially indelible example of doing the right thing even when you don't want to.

When she died I was relieved. I did what she wanted which was arrange for her brain to be donated to the local medical school, and then cremated. Those ashes sat in a closet at my house for a long time, because the ground was frozen where she was to be buried. I finally sent them off, ordered the engraving, and that was that.

She did have a great collection of books, though, which I still go dig out of my basement from time to time.