We’ve spent years telling my mom how happy all us kids are to be getting old at a time where there are transportation options. My brother gushes about how he’s looking forward to self-driving cars (Elon’s let him down so far, but there are other options on the horizon).
We’ve taken Ubers with her (just say “Mom, we’re taking you out to a nice dinner. But we all want some cocktails and wine, so we called an Uber.”)
She was so intrigued by getting the drivers’ biographies and hearing their stories, then chatting for the entire ride. That went a long way toward her feeling safer.
She hasn’t Ubered on her own yet, but that day might come… maybe before she shuffles off this mortal coil.
I will talk about this from the other side. I am 87 and still driving, although only locally. Three or four years ago, one of my children suggested I not drive long distance. Since I never liked distance driving, I listened to him.
A year and a half ago, I had my then doctor fill out the medical form the province requires every second year for anyone over 80 and she suggested I take a driver’s test. (I conjecture that she questioned my judgment because I had questioned hers. I still think I was right–you don’t order a PSA test for an 85 year old.) Anyway, the examiner commented that I drove the route (including a real bollix where a moving van had totally blocked one lane of a 2 lane residential street) exactly as well as he would’ve.
Still, the day will come. And I really dread the idea of learning to use Uber. We can get groceries and drugs delivered. But we still like to go downtown for an occasional concert. And there are medical appointments. Since out GP retiredm we have been assigned doctors in locations that are reachable by bus, but there is no parking. So far I have used taxis. Which we can afford, but I still don’t like them. It is hard for me to get into the back seat. The seat belts are always hard to use. And sometimes they send a van that my wife struggles to get into.
My kids live 300 miles, 450 miles, and 2500 miles away.
I’m not a neuropsychologist, but I would describe my MIL as being 85% “with it”. She covers and conceals well enough to fool anyone that doesn’t really know her, but she’s had enough lapses, though, that it’s actively raised the question in my mind how much longer she should be driving. I’m thinking the time to give up driving is drawing near sooner, rather than later. I broached the topic of her mother’s driving with my wife and she agrees with my views.
One very disturbing trend I’ve noticed in recent months is it seems her ability to learn and retain anything she learns has significantly degraded. For example, we noticed she was scrubbing floors last year in the kitchen on her hands and knees, apparently with considerable discomfort. We got her a floor cleaner for Christmas and showed her how to use it (it’s really not complicated to do. Attach a plastic tank full of fluid and then push two buttons) at Christmas and later on another occasion after my FIL reported she tried to use it but couldn’t figure it out. Last week we caught her scrubbing floors on her hands and knees again.
Yes, this can be a major problem. My wife’s mother did the same thing, completely fooled my wife’s older sister who lives 700 miles away. To the point where big sis thought it was just a matter of “popping over every few days for a bit of a chat to keep her company”, whereas in reality my wife was doing a 24/7 nursing job towards the end. Caused a great deal of family friction and resentment.
There was another thread about this recently, and a common theme was that people wait too long to get professional help. The situation creeps up on you insidiously until one day you realize you’re overwhelmed.
At some point physical welfare has to take precedence over trying to maintain a pretence of feelings of independence.
My one suggestion would be to not look at it as “taking the car keys away”. If someone were to try to take my keys away, there’d be an epic battle. Now, if someone tried to reason with me about how maybe I shouldn’t be driving, I might listen to reason.
My wife is dealing with this issue with her father. The state of Washington has been the biggest help, he failed the vision test to renew his license last October and they will not renew his license. He finally saw an eye doctor for the first time in 12 years, he has cataracts and glaucoma. He had a cataract procedure done in January, it helped his vision a little bit. After a check up a few weeks ago, the doctor doesn’t think my FIL is a candidate for a laser glaucoma procedure. My FIL claims he can see just fine and is now saying he he doesn’t get his license back, he will drive anyway. He had me look at his car last week because the battery is now dead. While under the hood, I unplugged the ECU. I told him he needs a new battery and that will cost $300. He balked at the price. He called a niece that works as a service writer at a Ford dealer, she is aware of the situation and quoted a high price to have his car checked. Last Sunday he sounded like he has resigned the idea of not driving again but yesterday called me and wants me to take his car shopping.
With my grandmother back in the 80’s, I swapped a couple plug wires on her car and told her the timing belt jumped and she needs a new engine. Some of the family jumped in to help make sure she got anywhere she needed to go.
We went through this with my mother over thirty years ago when her at first minor memory lapses got worse. She did NOT want to give up the freedom of driving and there were many ‘discussions’ of varying degrees of heat. Weirdly, we were ‘saved’ in the end by those memory problems.
We never took away her keys, we took away the car.
Her car was getting older, too, and developed a minor but noisy problem. One of my brothers had been a car mechanic earlier, so she agreed we should take the car over to his house (several towns away) for him to fix. Which he did right away, it was just some thing with the brakes, but as planned we never brought the car back home.
Mom lived with us by then, so we took care of getting her to doctors, etc, and handled groceries and so forth. Sometimes she’d notice that her car wasn’t sitting in the driveway and ask about it, and we’d remind her that Rob was fixing it for her, and that “he had to wait for some parts he’d had to order to come in.” Which satisfied her and she’d forget about it until the next time, and gradually it stopped ever coming up.
Several of Rob’s children used the car as ‘their’ first car over the years, with him taking care of the car expenses and insurance and whatall.
Oh boy, in my experience this is totally false. I know 3 over-90s who are perfectly capable of learning new things like driving a new car, playing golf on a new course, cooking on a new stove, driving a new boat, etc. Not to mention using a new computer, which is really hard for me sometimes! Where did you get the idea that the ability to learn new things just quits working at 90?
It doesn’t always come down to literally snatching the keys from their hand. Both my grandfather and my mother ( years later) had to be persuaded to give up driving. Gramps got in a really bad accident ( as in the motor cycle rider he hit ended up in the hospital for nearly a year ) and my uncles were informed that if they helped him buy a new car , they would be getting any future phone calls since my mother didn’t want to deal with it. And he certainly wasn’t going to take a cab or walk to a dealership. I don’t know why he didn’t want to stop driving - he lived in a very walkable part of NYC , his three children and eleven grandchildren lived within 15 minutes of him and if somehow none of those people could give him a ride it was easy to get a car service and he could afford it.
My mother I think on some level knew she shouldn’t be driving. For the last couple of years she only drove to and from church on Sunday - and the church was a mile from home. Then my BILs car broke down and she was persuaded to give it to them after they had already been using it for months during which she had been paying to insure it etc. She still talks about buying a new car sometimes, but can’t afford one.
What I’m dreading is the day my husband can no longer drive. It’s going to be really hard to convince him.
But those aren’t really new things - learning to drive a new car is not learning to drive and so on. And learning to use Uber when you are accustomed to Lyft is not the same as learning to use an app to get a ride when they are used to calling on the phone.
We found this to be a good approach with my mother-in-law.
She had had a couple of minor fender-benders over the previous few years, and has had vision, hearing, and reflex degradation over time. Mentally she’s still very much with it - she’s worried about Alzheimer’s, having lost a spouse to it, but at 88 years old that’s not going to be what gets her.
About a year or so into the pandemic she decided that between back pain, using a rollator, and needing cash, she needed to sell her car. We were at the point of needing a car anyway by that time - my daughter had just gotten her license - so we looked up Blue Book values together and took the private sale price.
She kinda regrets it, as her back pain is more under control now, and she sometimes talks about how she would prefer to still have her car. To tell the truth, she probably could get around to a few places by driving still. I’d prefer, though, that she stopped driving a little too early rather than far too late, and I have the privilege of sufficient flexibility to drive her around to her various appointments and the like, and she has some hired help who does shopping trips for her and some trips to the hair salon and the like.
The 90 year olds you refer to would likely be the exceptions that prove the rule. Yes, I too anecdotally know a 96 year old who is as sharp as a tack and is quite capable of learning, but I would say the large majority of the general population have lost the ability to learn to do novel things by that age. Those in doubt of this need only visit the nearest nursing home to get confirmation.
I really hope. There are people like Roger Penrose or Bertrand Russel who remain sharp as a tack well into their 90’s.
I try to keep tabs on myself at 75… I can still write a good C program, crank calculus up to at least undergrad level, produce a complete song in my home studio, and ace vocabulary tests etc…
It’s mostly genetic, I think. Hopefully my wife (6 years younger) will notice if I start to fail, and tell me…
I have - but it’s still nothing like learning to drive at 90 when you never have before. That’s great that you know people who are over 90 and can still learn new things - but think about what they are learning. Is it something completely new or is it related to something they’ve already knew ? Are they learning to bake bread when they have spent their whole life eating microwaved food and takeout or are they learning to bake bread when they’ve been baking pastries all their life ? Are they learning pickleball after a life of tennis or racquetball or is it after a lifetime of bowling?
My grandmother is in her nineties and in no mental condition to drive a car. However, she still has one, and no intention of giving it up. Often she loaned it to my uncle or my brother, only to later demand to know who had stolen her car! Other times she’d drive my mom (her caretaker) batshit asking again and again where her car was. Mom even recorded her once as she loaned the car to someone, and would play it for Grandma when she started asking, but it didn’t keep her from continuing to ask.
There are professional services out there that can evaluate drivers for competence. Since they’re a third party with no skin in the game, they can be more honest/blunt about what they witness than a family member might be.
Apart from starting the discussion very early, getting them used to alternatives very early, and giving them a clear picture of the actual cost of owning and operating a car versus ride-share and/or taxi services, there’s another useful tack one might try. Elderly parents often don’t want to become a burden on their families, and a lot of them also want to leave their children with as generous an inheritance as they can manage. An elderly driver might be motivated to give up their keys if they’re confronted with the very real possibility that they might be remembered most for dragging an unseen child to death under their car, and that they nest egg they’ve worked all their life for, and had planned to leave to their children, will instead be awarded to the family of the child they killed.
I just can’t imagine arguing with my kids about this. They’re good people. They love me. If they say it’s time, even if I don’t agree, I’ll trust their judgment.
My in-laws never learned how to use a smartphone. MIL had an iPad Mini for a bit (BIL gave it to her) but she played games on it for a while then gave it up. That would have been their only way to summon a ride. We looked at that Go Go Grandparents service but FIL could not use a cell phone (hearing impaired).
Neither parent was as mentally flexible as they’d been even 10 years before, judging by the frequent calls we got for help with their computers.
Hopefully, when our time comes, we’ll be better off, having basically “grown up” with computers (not literally; home PCs were not a thing until we were in our 20s - but both my husband and I use computers all day every day).