Tell me about it. My mother was always happiest—like me—with a book in her lap and another two at the ready. Now, due to multi-infarct dementia (what F.U. Shakespeare’s mother had), she has no short-term memory, so she can’t read anymore. Her greatest pleasure and escape, and just when she needs it most, she can’t do it anymore. So, yes, the TV as background noise is a hugely depressing reminder that she is fading away.
I gave her a kina hora by being grateful all these years that Alzheimer’s doesn’t run in our family . . .
I was working short term in the UK when my Mum had her fall (that phrase alone makes her sound elderly!) and was very grateful to be able to go home for a weekend so easily.
But … there are two flights a day from Paris to the airport nearest my parents, I can get home in as little as three hours door to door if there’s an available place on a flight (add on another hour if I have to go to the next nearest airport) - it would take my brother as long to drive up from where he lives. One of the reasons I have a credit card is that I would, if need be, be able to get a flight home without worrying about the state of my bank account. I would be highly unlikely to move anywhere further away that’s for sure.
I know that I’m not an executor of my parents’ wills, they thought I was unlikely to be in the country (I’ve lived outside the UK for almost 10 years now) so they chose my (older) brother and aunt.
My Dad asked me recently if I could ever see myself living in their house, I said no. It makes me think that he may have something up his sleeve. I should stress that my parents had relatively well paid jobs and I’m sure that they have money put aside somewhere. They know the ‘good’ hospitals and ‘bad’ hospitals in the area and I’m pretty sure that the fact they were doctors means that they’ll be more aware of what things need taking into consideration. I’m pretty confident, optimistic?, that the services in the UK will be adequate and that medical friends of my parents would be able to help and advise should my parents become unable to make their own decisions (again I know I’m lucky).
I don’t know maybe I’m getting complacent, your thread has started me thinking again. When one of them dies I’m ready to go home and spend as much time as necessary with the surviving partner but I’d not thought further. I’m getting married this summer - we’re having two ceremonies, the legal/civil one in June and the religious one in September - Mum recently said she was coming to the one in June “So I make it to at least one of them she says cheerfully”. Maybe I should take this time as an opportunity to talk to them in a bit more detail about the “future”.
I can’t even begin to describe my reactions to this thread.
On one hand, we’re dealing with aging parents: my mother is blind from macular degeneration but still able to live in her own home as long as someone can do grocery shopping for her; and my mother-in-law is in a nursing home because she has Alzheimer’s. But each of these ladies is 92 years old.
On the other hand, at 62 I’m older than the OP’s mother and, while I’m certainly not young, I’d never in a million years consider myself an “aging parent”. Good Grief! I’ll be 63 when we retire and take off on our sailboat to see the world.
Not only that, I can’t imagine ever being dependent on my children and will do everything in my power to see that it never happens.
No one know what’s in the future, and we have to be aware that it won’t be all lillipops and roses. As Eve stated, you can’t very well plan for the unknown. The only way you can “get ready” is to be mentally prepared to roll with the punches when the years do start taking their toll.
In the meantime, enjoy what you have; let you parents enjoy what they have and make the most of life.
My Dad is 60, and I never thought of him as an ‘aging parent’ either. I’m 28, for the record. He had a mild heart attack 5 or 6 years ago, but we never really talk about it.
About a year ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia (CLL, I think). The doctors wanted to get him started on chemo, so they gave him a bunch of tests. Because of these tests, they discovered that he had a tumor on one kidney, and that his heart wasn’t doing that well. They decided to go ahead with the chemo to take care of the leukemia, and to monitor the tumor. He finished his chemo right before Christmas (which did take care of the leukemia) and the doctors decided to remove the bad kidney. Well, they did some more tests to make sure he was recovered enough from the chemo for the surgery, and then decided that he should probably have a by-pass operation right now.
He ended up with 7 by-passes (I think that’s the most you can get). He was in the hospital for about a week, and then came home to recover. The doctors scheduled him to get his kidney out last week - they were going to use a new technique that uses a scope and only requires an overnight stay after the operation. Well, they did some tests on his kidney function the day before the operation, and the doctors decided that my Dad couldn’t afford to lose the whole kidney. Because of that, they had to do the operation the old-fashioned, more invasive way so they could have room to cut off the bad parts and re-attach everything to the good part. The operation was last Thursday, and he’s hopefully coming home from the hospital today.
The point I’m trying to get across with my story here is a two-parter. The first part is that you never know when or how something is going happen, and you’ve just got to take the time you’ve got. That leads me to my second point: When I got out of school, I was thrilled to get away from parents and out on the road. I spent 2 years touring the country, and now I’m settling in around southern CA. My parents live in Connecticut. I’ve flown home a few times to help out, but I can’t afford to be there as much as I want to. It’s hard being on the wrong side of the country when your family needs you, and now I’m trying to figure out what the hell to do as my parents get older.
Sorry for the long post, but this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. It’s tough, and it seems like it’s all happening a lot sooner than I thought it would.
I think that is the scariest thing- watching and listening to how my parents take care of their mothers(both grandfathers are long dead). The difference between having a healthy, (mostly) happy, continent(so far as we know) and largely independent person and having an unhealthy, unhappy, incontinent, largely dependent person is frighteningly short.
One grandmother is still largely independent, and is actually much better off now that she has given up her house- where she was largely homebound due to mobility issues that have somewhat been resolved (still, no steps is a good thing).
My other grandmother. . . . I don’t really want to think about it enough to provide accurate details, but there was a point when putting her (against her will) into assisted living was discussed and we suddenly discovered that there was a significant waiting list to get in. A year later, with other events in the middle, she’s in assisted living.
Three years ago, we traveled together to South Africa. I had to help her with things like calculating tip on her credit card bill, keep track of the time, keep track of her lens cap, make sure she when she left the bathroom she found her way back to the groupetc. But while she needed more “handholding” than the tour leaders could have given her without me, she was able to enjoy the trip and take pictures and chat with people.
A year later, I showed my picture album to a mutual relation, and Grandma was startled to see a picture of the two of us in a foreign country. She seemed to remember her trip there, (or at least one of her trips to Africa) but she’d forgotten that I had been there, and that I had traveled with her.