Caregiving for Your Elderly Parents - Real Stories to Help You Care for Your Loved Ones

Chapter One

The Elephant
in the Room

My Parents Then. The Talk. My Parents Now.

Marky writes

When the time comes for the tables to turn and the adult child becomes the parent of parents, looking back at how one was raised is inevitable. My childhood journey could be described as idyllic. I grew up in a small town where we ran free for hours. My mother was at home and my father was an engineer at General Mills in Lodi, California. The economic picture was very poor by today’s standards, but I didn’t know that. My father built our first ski boat-a 14’ wooden craft propelled by a used 25 horse power Evinrude motor. We all learned to slalom ski on the local lake behind that handmade boat, propelled by that small engine. I remember spending hours watching my dad build that boat in our garage. From my mother, I learned the lifelong power of a beloved hobby-she sewed. She would pour over Vogue Magazine, draw pictures and make the clothes. Somehow, my parents found the money to take us snow skiing in the winter. We wore our only wool coats. Mine was long and plaid. I was a skiing princess.

In the summer, we towed our boat behind an old car to Lake Shasta where we camped and skied for two weeks. There were many flat tires and 25 cent watermelons from road stands on the way home…searches under the seats produced quarters to buy them. I rode my bike to school. My parents were always in the yearly talent show, still dancing and singing in my picture gallery of memories. The pictures certainly aren’t digital, but they are indelibly imprinted in my mind and on my heart. I was loved unconditionally and I knew it.

My husband and I recently returned to my childhood home for a short visit. I loved seeing my old home and the town, but it was the lake that really took me back. Re-visiting the scene of the pure happiness of youth and its dancing memories has a power like no other.

My family lived within a day’s drive of my parents all of the years we raised our daughters. Familial love was the basis, but my parents saw us as equals and the relationship mellowed into one of comfort, trust and camaraderie. We spent holidays and vacations together and the special link extended to our daughters. They took summer trips to visit by themselves. My husband’s bond with my dad grew from endless home improvement projects, golf, watching sports and playing cards. Gin rummy was the game of choice. We would hear a loud “Gin” followed by devilish laughter. My mother and the girls and I did girl stuff. After visits, we returned to our respective full and productive lives.

Then my mother had a stroke.

I was a high school teacher by this time, our girls were out of college and one was married. The good choices I had made through my life and the trusting relationship we had built with my parents were to be tested repeatedly during the following years. My mother’s first stoke became the dividing line of my life. My mother as I had known her was gone. The daughter she had known became her mother.

My parents moved to a Life Care Community in Olympia, a two hour drive from us. I learned to leave promptly after my last class on Friday; otherwise, the Friday traffic would double the time. Then, Mom suffered another stroke that left her wheelchair-bound, which is completely different than “needing a wheelchair to get around”. One learns quickly about lifts, catheters, occupational therapists, skin sores resulting from compromised circulation, sinks and counters that are too high or too low and, if one is lucky, accessible vans. Woven around those needs, one learns about Medicare, endless specialists, hospital realities, a Durable Power of Attorney, Wills and Medical Directives. I haven’t encountered anyone who actually wants to learn about such things. But you do if you want to survive.

If you haven’t had the talk with your parents, you do because it’s no longer just an elephant in the room; the elephant is now sucking the air out of the room.

You talk. You plan. You fight. You cry. And at some point, you move to the top of the familial hierarchy. My parents’ life affairs were pretty straight-forward: the long-ago-written Will had been lost, the attorney was deceased and there was no long-term care insurance. On the plus side, my dad had retired with an excellent pension, as well as health insurance and he was a veteran. He was in good shape financially, but the money was tied to him, not Mom and her care needs doubled their cost of living.

We saw an attorney and left with a Will, a Medical Directive, Durable Power of Attorney (DPOA) and advice to get my name on their checking account. My father gifted me what money the law allowed, and moved his assets to an annuity which was in my name. Without the trust we had built, none of this would have happened. Without the DPOA, my name on their checking account and asset organization, my life would have been a nightmare. It wasn’t exactly a cakewalk, but I slept most nights during the next 7 years that my parents lived.

Those details are the logistics, which filled and spilled over into the spare moments in my own busy life. It is far more difficult to describe emotions. Often, out of necessity or fear, emotions were denied or tabled until later for assessment. But there were moments when pure love and gratefulness were expressed in quiet eyes. Even when those feelings were expressed with words, they weren’t as powerful as the uncertainty of silence.

During the last 5 years of my mother’s life, she didn’t really suffer from dementia. It was more that her personality was flat. The beautiful ups and downs of her laughter and unconditional love lost their animation. Still there, just very quiet. My father exhibited anger as he wrestled with what he saw as “the unfairness” of it all. He gradually adjusted during the last five years of Mom’s life, then he suffered a stroke a year after she died. He survived, but in a state of dementia. Dementia has the power to cause deep heartache for those who love the sufferer. But I will give this to dementia: while it robs a person of self, at least it cocoons its crime in unawareness.

My Parents Aren’t Ozzie and Harriet

Dauna writes

No, they aren’t Ozzie and Harriet and I can prove it. As I write this my parents are both eighty-eight years old and relatively healthy. But at age eighty-eight all health is relative. They live independently, not even in retirement communities, but not together. They divorced when I was already an adult.

As a child I watched 1950s style sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver and wondered why I was living at the wrong address. I would have fit perfectly into the TV show’s Ozzie and Harriet’s family. I couldn’t play the guitar like their son Ricky, but I loved to sing and dance. At Ozzie and Harriet’s house the parents were calm and reasonable. They solved family problems with discussions. I was perfectly suited for that environment. I wanted to behave, do well in school, and please everyone. Instead I lived in typhoon alley, more like one of today’s reality TV shows…the kind of show I currently use the remote control to avoid.

Unfortunately kids aren’t born with a remote control for their lives. What was the big issue? My dad had girlfriends…lots of them. There are professional golf players and basketball stars who would be impressed by his stats on this issue. History books now suggest to us that JFK was a womanizer. Who knows? But back then presidents had the media protecting their privacy. And my mother was no Jackie Kennedy. Jackie seemed stoic about her situation, if it was true. My mother was the gurgling opposite. Mom reacted to Dad’s flings like a flame to a keg of dynamite. And we kids were right in the middle of the continuing explosions.

Fights aside, my folks also didn’t parent like Ozzie and Harriet either. On Saturdays when we would go with mom to the grocery store, the meat store, the discount store, the dairy etc. (Mom was always looking for the cheapest way to buy things) my sister Judy and I were allowed to have ten cents each, if we were good, to purchase something at the dime store. I’m aging myself here…think dollar store. One time we saw a small toy pop-up toaster that cost 29 cents. We loved the way those toy pieces of bread popped up. We begged mom for it. She said, “No” because it was nine cents extra and she thought we would fight over it. We continued to beg and swore we would share, so she finally relented.

On the way home we had a dispute in the backseat over the toaster. Mom calmly reached over the seat, grabbed our cherished new toaster, rolled down the car window and threw it out. She didn’t even slow down. We didn’t cry. We wouldn’t dare. The punishment wasn’t even what stunned us into silence. Mom had just thrown 29 cents out the window! The world could end on a day like that.

Nope, it sure wasn’t Ozzie and Harriet. Who could imagine Harriet in her shirt waist dress throwing that toy out of the car window?

However, parts of my childhood were perfect for me. When I was seven we moved from our shack on the side of a hill to a modest baby boomer type subdivision in suburbia. I thought I was in heaven. Kids were everywhere and I loved being outside. I was athletic and popular in the neighborhood. I stayed outdoors from the time my chores were done until the lightning bugs appeared. I thrived in that environment. School was also easy for me and by third grade I had decided to become a teacher. I felt both safe and successful at school. I...