Gazing into Our Eldercare Futures
”Hi Rachel, I started reading your blog again in April. It was exactly what I was looking for — it felt like an old friend.”
As I was pondering this week’s topic, my muse appeared in my email. We became acquainted a number of years ago when the proximity of our annual summer rentals and kids’ ages caused us to fall into an easy friendship. And then we developed an enduring connection around eldercare. “Such a nice gift to get your note!” I replied. “I truly am talking to you thru my content. Our connection and conversations and experiences informed and inspired so much of what I am doing.”
Even though we only live 45 minutes from each other during the school year, a river and the demands of daily life divides. So we rely on scheduled phone calls every few months to catch up in between the sweet, slow, summertime unwind that is our shared island time. “I had been feeling down about my mother's death and my father's fragility,” wrote my Sh*t S*ster. “April really is the cruelest month — and your blog made me feel less alone.”
A year ago I was manically documenting my ideas for my TIGO empire, which came together in a fury of writing and iPad app-organizing and, most enjoyably, our beach talk-time. For the past few summers my friend was my early inspiration and fervent supporter, with the apex of our journey coming unexpectedly when her mother died right before we saw each other last August, technically but tragically of end-of-life issues.
These days my friend is slowly healing but still shaken, and now facing the other shoe-fall that comes with aging parents. “Some ideas for other posts: Balancing work with elder care,” she offered by email. “I just turned down a position because I didn’t know what the next 1-2 years holds.” Every week she visits her dad who lives a state away, deposits checks she finds floating around his house, and holds her relationship with her sibling at arm’s-length, to protect herself from his lackluster eldercare engagement. And still, she finds sweetness in what she calls “the immediacy of the present moment,” the child-like pleasure her father takes in little outings, like a family meal to mark the anniversary of his wife’s passing.
In her voice I hear the familiar tone of guilt and longing expressed about our elders. I relive the optimism that it could be a successful solution to move an isolated parent out of their single family home and into an adult child’s sunroom. I quote the eldercare consultant I’ve turned to for six years about my own hard decisions (and also echo her Dad’s concerns) when I say “it will ruin your life,” while still joining her in the current American navel gazing about alternatives to nursing home care. For now, she puts her Dad’s name on the list of local assisted living homes.
Despite the sad and stressful anecdotes and ongoing ambiguity we share with each other — talking at manic speed in between family obligations — we are laughing, laughing, laughing, at the extremity of the emotional moments, the fear of the unknown, and the urge to organize-away the pain and uncertainty. And we are enjoying the relief of being irreverent.
At the end of our conversation she recounted seeing an elder acquaintance last summer who was telling the same stories over and over and over again: “He was cracking himself up!” While his audience worried about his cognitive faculties and ability to handle future travel to his beloved vacation home, he himself was blissfully ignorant and thoroughly entertained.
Which is really all any of us can aspire to — for our elders, and ourselves.