Tag Archives: aging parents

Really, Truly, Looking at Death

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Some reps for a solar company came to our house two nights ago and presented us with a breakdown of the benefits of going solar.  I had so many questions that these guys couldn’t answer.  Solar is so new.  When the main guy told us that our system would be guaranteed for twenty-five years, and that each system tended to break down after thirty, I asked him about the game plan for replacing a system:  would it be cheaper, since there was already a system in place?  He did not know the answer because there is very little data out there for thirty-year-old solar systems.  Then my husband interjected, “We’ll be in our eighties when that happens, so…” So we’ll be close to cashing out on our lifetimes by then–I believe he was implying with the unfinished sentence.  Shit.

I have fewer years left than what I’ve already lived.  There’s a thought that I didn’t dwell on in my glorious forties.  When you’re in your forties, you think you’re about halfway there. Even when you are forty-nine, you still think you’re at the halfway mark.  When the number rolls over into fifty, you KNOW, you FUCKING KNOW, that you aren’t making it to 100.  Well, I know I’m not making to 100, and neither is my husband.  I’m not aware of any heavy smokers or heavy drinkers who have passed that threshold; but hey, if you can reverse diabetes through diet and lifestyle, perhaps you can reverse liver disease and lung corruption. 

And then there’s that woman in the trance years ago who told me how long I would live, but I will not commit that number to print.  I’ve been fooled by that sorcery before– when I was twelve or thirteen, my sister-in-law asked some deadbeat to give me a reading.  NONE of the shit this woman predicted happened, not even close.  I just spent the next ten years of my life wondering.  She looked at me, and she knew I was smart, so she gave me a future that she envisioned for a smart kid with the prospect of going to college.  It was ridiculous—public speaking, a lab coat, several children.  This woman clearly had no idea how the white-collar world conducted its affairs or who I was.  So no.  I will not commit to a number thrown out there by a clairvoyant.  But, realistically, I’m not making it to 100.

What am I getting at with this, exactly?  I believe that with the passing of my father—an event that I have still not acknowledged on many levels—I have crossed the threshold into their world.  I am now among the oldies; and us oldies handle this shit in very, very different ways.  I am fortunate to have friends of the same age who deal with aging very differently—some were mentally in their fifties before they graduated college.  Some, like me, burned through a few relationships and careers before they found themselves.  Others have had vaginal rejuvenations, boob lifts, and Botox shots.  I’m in some category for women who didn’t expect to ever be fifty, and then one day, there we were.  Intuitively, I knew I would have to face the deaths of my parents one day.  Intuitively, I knew I would be an “oldie” someday—I see the grays coming in—but mentally, I’m not ready for this. 

I’m not ready to make a decision about going solar that will live on past my existence on this earth.  I like the idea of setting this house up for future residents.  Isn’t that nice?  Thinking forward into the future of our kids’ generation and our grandkids’ generation sure is nice.  But, unfortunately, we oldies have to live for the now and the immediate.  We have to secure our long-term care insurance and save for our retirements and make sure we don’t end up where our parents and our grandparents did in those last, demoralizing days.  I say this with all the bravado of a woman who has just witnessed the indignities of “skilled nursing” facilities.  Dad probably had a similar reckoning back when Grandma was carrying around a child’s baby doll and crying at reminders of her real self.  This will not be my future, but this just might be my future.  

Guilt and Grief–Mates for Life

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The winters are warm now.  I felt a tickle across my hand this morning while I was reading on the sofa, one dog under my legs, another dog on top—a tick in late December.  How things have changed.  I put it, alive, in a sandwich bag.  I don’t know why.

I am home now—my adult home.  I’m in my house, and I’m even enjoying myself a little bit.  I like cooking and reading and taking short rides to the store in my new car that I park at the very end of any parking lot so I can avoid little scratches and scuffs for as long as possible.  Yesterday, after a good-morning hug, I looked my husband in the eye and asked, “You didn’t buy that car just because I was sad, did you?”  or something like that.   He said no, said we needed it, and we had the budgeted for it.  My oldest stepson has taken over the stewardship of the big SUV, the one we bought ten years ago for ski trips and road trips with little kids and large dogs.  Now he’s a big kid with his own traveling to do, and that is now his car.  And so the cycle of life continues.

I was in the doldrums, alone in my dad’s apartment, when my husband told me that my stepson had gotten the job, starting this winter break, and that I should distract myself with shopping for another car.  He let me pick it—the make, model, trim, everything.  I won’t say I went directly to the most loaded model available.  I’ll say that, in increments, my husband encouraged the journey.  I’m a car person, and he’s not.  I’m vain, and he’s not.  It didn’t take long to get me into a sport-touring model with black trim and leather seats and a heated steering wheel despite the warm winters ahead.  It has a paint-job that looks flat on a cloudy day, but in the sun, you can see a million little gold sparkles.  Yes, we had talked about getting another car.  We knew that one of the kids would eventually need a car.  But we could have paid cash for a used Civic with 100,000 miles on it and gotten that job done.  No, I suspect this car is also my distraction from grief.

I am fortunate to have such distractions.  I work at a college, so I am “fortunate” to have had the time to spend with my Dad over a winter break.  My husband has the ability to work from anywhere, so we were “privileged” to be able to spend two weeks with Dad who was fighting to stay alive while also fighting to die.  He picked a good time for it, I suppose.    

The subconscious will to survive, I believe, is quite strong.  Dad’s still fighting both battles.  I’m not there, but he still is, in that beige room with the fluorescent light that doesn’t work, and the roommate asking through the curtain divider if we have any snacks on us.  The roommate, apparently, ended up in the skilled nursing cycle of hell because his home care person tried to poison him.  So much drama.  I could write a book about that awful place. It would begin ten years ago, when my old friend’s sister was a floor nurse there.  She drank a bottle of vodka one evening, came to work, shot a patient dead and then shot herself.  She never should have gone into nursing, not with her temperament.  I feel too much, and Dad knew it, and that’s why he never discussed his DNR with me, or his suicide pact with his brother that never came to fruition.  I know why my friend’s sister did what she did.

I’ll get to take advantage of my swell schedule again real soon when I go back up there to help my brother clear out Dad’s apartment.  He told the landlord, an old family friend, yesterday that Dad would not be coming back, and he paid the rent forward two months.  That’s one of the things that really stings about imminent death—walking into someone’s home and seeing their stuff as they left it, knowing they will never return to use it.  I experienced that with Mom, and it hit me hard, looking at her shoes that she would never put on her feet again.  When it was Dad’s turn, I somewhat more prepared for the punch.  I walked into his place two weeks ago after my first visit with him in the hospital, had a little cry, and then dismissed the grief.  You can’t.  You just can’t embrace grief while your loved one is still fighting that primordial battle to stay alive, despite DNRs and suicide pacts. 

Dad’s still alive.  I’m not there.  This isn’t how I wanted things to go. 

Bring on the morphine.

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I’m home now, and I have the privilege of spending this day doing whatever random shit I feel like doing.  I ate some pasta for breakfast. I started to dismantle my garden.  Winter is finally here.  I told my Early Girl that I was proud of it because it still had a little life left in there, in the stem and the roots.  That one was the only tomato that I intentionally planted that survived the season.  I concluded the season cultivating whatever random tomato varieties presented themselves from the compost in the soil.  Nature gifted us with hundreds of sweet little pear tomatoes, sprung from the seeds of some supermarket tomato that didn’t make it onto our plates but did make it into the compost.  I talked to my nearly-dead tomatoes and my dead eggplants and peppers and I cried a little in between.  I think I’m going to need to seek some therapy.  I’ve avoided it for a long time, but this grief has compounded over these past two weeks, and I’m numb.  And I’m acting weird.  Something in there is broken.

We left town yesterday, my hubby and I.  Left my brother to witness the very end.  It was selfish of me to leave, but I wanted to leave so badly that all I could think about to keep me from breaking down all day was how great it was gonna feel to be in my cluttered, dirty house with my dogs and my own stuff.  My own messes in my own home.  Yesterday was a turning point at the “skilled nursing facility.”  The 23 year-old floor manager who’s probably at her first job out of college because she can’t deviate from a script popped into Dad’s cubicle to tell me they wanted to schedule all this shit—put him back on an IV, take him to the hospital to have some “suspicious node” in his lung checked out, bloodwork, etc.  My husband asked her what the end goal of the hospital visit was, and she responded in all seriousness, “to check to make sure the node isn’t cancerous,” like looking for lung cancer is a priority at this stage in his decline.  I reminded her that Dad had a DNR order, and that it stated that he didn’t want IV fluids.  I also told her Dad didn’t need to go to the hospital to look for lung cancer.  I then called my brother because it’s hard to tell a 23 year-old that she cannot give your dehydrated father IV fluids to sustain his now miserable existence. 

My brother was, of course, pissed that these procedures were even suggested because he had discussed the DNR orders days ago with someone else. 

“Tell her we have a POA on file and a DNR with explicit instructions.  And we can scratch the hospital visits.  We can deal with a suspicious node if he ever snaps out of this.  In the meantime, not a priority.”  

So the befuddled floor manager came back with the beautiful nurse practitioner who I am pretty certain my brother has a giant crush on, and she started asking ME the heavy questions—do I authorize no hospital visits, no trips to the ER, no fluids, no tubes, no CPR?  What the actual fuck is this place?  I didn’t have power-of-attorney.  Legally, I was just a visitor.  I could have authorized any invasive and unnecessary procedure that they threw at me by virtue of being a person in the room.   I’ll bet that my Dad’s friend Jimmy who was in town visiting from Iowa could have authorized it if he happened to be there when the floor manager came by.  

Luckily, my sister-in-law walked in the door at that moment and explained Dad’s predicament very clearly—IVs are only a short-term fix; he doesn’t WANT to get better.  He stopped eating weeks ago when he was much more cognizant of his surroundings.  Basically, he WANTS to die, and we’re going to grant him his wish.  No emergency trips to the ER, no scheduled hospital visits or MRIs, no IV, no resuscitation.  This was HIS decision.

The DNR was Dad’s decision that he put in writing in 1997, long before he had experienced the nursing home circle of hell with my grandmother.  After that, he set up his power of attorney.  He even had a pseudo pact with my uncle that one would kill the other before either one of them ended up in a nursing home.  His biggest nightmare is happening RIGHT NOW, and he just wants out.  Bring on the morphine.  Helping him die comfortably on heavy drugs to numb the pain is the only positive thing that this shithole of a care facility can do for him.  These people can’t even find his pants in his closet.  They put him out in the hall, pantsless, with pneumonia.  This den of incompetence is NEVER going to rehabilitate him, so instead of hurling him into the insurance wood-chipper—transporting him around to useless doctors’ appointments and putting him on an IV every other day just to keep him alive until Medicare can drain all of his assets—it’s going to give him his dying wish.  Enforcing his DNR is all the power we have, and it’s going to this end this nightmare for all of us.

On my way out the door yesterday, while Dad was once again talking the air and trying to get his legs over the side of the bed in a weak attempt to escape, I said, “I love you,” and he replied, “Love you.”  Those are some fine last words, I think.  I, of course, have a lot of regrets about how I handled this ordeal.  I’ll discuss them another time.  I’m fine concluding today’s thoughts with the best last words you can hear from someone—I love you.

Coping Mechanisms for the Middle-Aged.

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My husband and I are staying at my Dad’s place during this marathon of unpleasant experiences.  It’s not the most romantical of settings.  I had insisted to my husband to just stay home and that I was just fine being here at Dad’s by myself, but he ignored me and came anyway.  Good thing.  I can allow this man’s eccentricities to entertain me, and I can feel at home in his presence.  On his way back to Dad’s place a few days ago, he went into record-hunting mode—that’s his latest obsession since his dad bought him a turntable for Father’s Day—and found a store that sells vinyl in some small town en route to my childhood home and distracted himself there for awhile, reliving his own particular childhood.  Today, he found another record store, and we both went, and I got some used Donna Summers and some Pink Floyd.  I think he got an Ozzy record.  He chastised himself several hours later, when I told him to grab Loretta Lynn if he ever sees her records, because he had been looking at a copy of Coal Miner’s Daughter and didn’t buy it.  He was getting real hard on himself, and that made me laugh—the absurdity of it all.  The very least of either of our worries is why my husband didn’t grab the Loretta Lynn record before I had even told him I wanted one.  He has a handful of oddities and work-arounds.  Those are the some of his most fascinating features.  And he’s HERE, supporting me through another parent crisis.  No one voluntary spends time in a nursing home unless it’s absolutely necessary, and I believe he thinks it is, which means that he thinks family is worthy of any sacrifice.  And if he believes that, then he is really on to something.  Why deprive ourselves, then, of some small pleasures along Misery Road, like buying an Ozzy record?  Seems a decent way to stay sane, right? 

I, myself, took advantage of a discount warehouse and refreshed my active workout gear.  Bargains are intoxicating.  A Donna Summers record for $3 and a North Face sweatshirt  for ten?  I’d call that a good day in the realm of disbelief and avoidance.  I forget what my husband asked me, but it had something to do with my holding up or self-care or something.  Without a second thought, I declared that I was simply on auto-pilot.  I realize that I am not allowing all of my emotions to reveal themselves right now.  I can shut some down when I need to, and I don’t want anyone who can’t do that invading my space or coming to visit Dad.  We are the adults now, in this situation.  We are the parents.  We can’t afford to break down and lose our shit in public.   Sometimes I think the sanest and sharpest I’ve even been has been during times of crisis.

Cancer is the New Black

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I upset my husband last night with a little dose of dark humor. I asked him what cancer he thought would be the cancer that did each of us in, and he knocked on the wall. Apparently, he doesn’t want to joke about dying. I guess that’s alright, but personally, I would rather think about it now than be surprised by its sudden appearance. What is death, anyway, but just a phase of life, that seventh age, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”? We should be so lucky.

Most of us aren’t going to make it to that seventh age that Shakespeare described in his seven ages of man speech. We’re not going to die in our nineties, drifting peacefully into oblivion while our family sits around the bedside, our spouses spooning soft food into our birdlike mouths. We can’t expect our deaths anymore, can’t plan for them. They’ll just announce themselves. Perhaps our family will be sitting around us when we go, but that probably isn’t going to be in our nineties.

Cheery, no? Maybe it’s the Fluoxetine, or maybe it’s just all the preparation I’ve had, but I don’t find death depressing. For me, it is not a debilitating thought. Do I want to lose my mother? Absolutely not. Do I feel that she and I still have a bucket list the size of Texas full of items that never will be checked off? Absolutely. Is she or I or anyone in our world ready for this? No. But it’s gonna happen, and it might happen far sooner than any of us thought it would. My mother has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, a nasty cancer that has metastasized into her liver. She can’t eat. She can’t sleep. She can’t even sit up comfortably. Two months ago, we were on a vacation together in Maine. She and I walked down to the main drag in Bar Harbor, and she nagged me about how much money I spent. Now, she’s homebound, using a wheelchair, wearing great big t-shirts twenty-four-seven, and not eating a single thing. She wants to go, man. Who am I to stop her? I can’t do anything except be there for her. And that’s what I intend to do.

I remember when my dad first got prostate cancer back in 2005. I was strung out back then, and so I bawled and bawled and made my dad’s tragedy all about me and my business, and my personal regrets. I didn’t really do much to help him or mom. That was a long time ago.  I’ve since done a lot of helping. Like my recently departed uncle, I’ve showed up at hospitals with my sleeves rolled up, ready for action. What else the fuck can one do?

For three days, I’ve been wearing a tatty old dress that I bought on a road trip that I took with my mother. We spent seven days driving around Michigan together, sightseeing and driving each other nuts, and listening to the Grateful Dead channel, and bonding. It was the best vacation I’ve ever taken. In a little shop on Mackinaw Island, I bought a Woolrich dress that I wore almost every day for the rest of the trip. Somewhere, there’s a picture of me in that dress at the edge of the Sleeping Bear Dunes in Western Michigan, white sands that dropped so steeply into the shores of Lake Michigan that the park service posted warnings: you attempt to go down there, you will pay heavily for your rescue. And still, hundreds of tourists slid down those slopes and snaked their way back up the dunes. They looked like ant trails from our perspective at the top. What an awe-inspiring American vista. And I shared it alone with her. And now I’m still wearing that dress, even though the ass is worn out, and you can see the color of my underwear through the holes. I will never throw away that dress. I said I was accepting of death, I didn’t say I wasn’t sentimental.

There’s a lot of kids out there who treat their parents like shit. And there’s a lot of kids out there who are perennially lost. They need to look death in the face, stop knocking on walls. Cancer is the new black.

Does Anyone Else Feel Old?

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I‘m having one of those, “Can this really be happening?” weeks. Yes, it can, and yes, it is.   This week was the double whammy of a sudden death in the family and the potential for much worse endings, pending a few tests. I feel old.   Mom and Dad have been careful about when to call me with news. They expect me to break down while I’m driving or whatnot, so they wait until I’m sitting on a couch with my husband nearby to tell me whatever it is they have to say. Then they marvel at my ability to just hear it.   I guess I grew up.

I’ve noticed lately that I keep thinking that I’m forty-six, even though I’m forty-five. In fact, for the past year, I’ve considered myself closer to fifty than I really am. Why is that? Why am I making myself old, rushing through the remainder of my forties?   Maybe it’s because the forties kinda suck. I just have this feeling that the forties are gonna go down in my history as the decade I lost everyone.

I’ll explain: My favorite uncle had a stroke on the operating table and died exactly a week later. We all thought it was gonna be a quick and easy operation. We all expected this summer to be the worst of his trials. Not even close. I don’t think anyone was prepared for an end. My father sure wasn’t. He lost his little brother, his closest sibling, and his greatest ally. This uncle and I spent weeks together while my mother and father were in the hospital or recuperating from one illness or the next. He was always there to help. I thought my mom was being morbid when she alluded to his last visit, while he was still on chemo, as a potential final hurrah. Damn, these people in their seventies who are so starkly aware of death.

And that’s one bit of bad news that has colored my week. There’s more, but the test results aren’t in, and I’m still allowed hope. Hope feels very different lately. It’s not a positive or a negative, it’s just an unknown. Sometimes, the unknown is better. For a little while anyway, while we process what we do know.

Falling

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Mom fell today.

I had been dreading an incident like that.  She’s hearing-impaired, easily distracted, and clumsy.  I spent the first twenty years of my life hearing a “thump” and then “Owwww!” and then “Shit, shit, SHIT!” (Mom never said anything worse than “shit.”)  She was always walking into doorways or falling up stairs or bumping her toes on the furniture.  So I just knew that one of these days, on my watch, she was gonna fall flat on her face in public.

And so she did, at a busy intersection in front of a bus stop.  Fifteen seconds earlier she’d decided she wanted to walk the six blocks back to my car rather than sit on a bench and wait in a nearby park.  She’s stubborn like that.  Then, right in the middle of a conversation about what a great day we’d had shopping…  Blam!  Her bags fell out of her hands as she tried to catch herself, and I threw mine in a half-assed attempt to catch her.  Our stuff rolled all over the sidewalk. A guy in full Navy sailor regalia picked up her canister of silver cupcake topping and stuffed it back into the wrong bag and handed it to me.  Two ladies gave us their packet of tissues and stared for a second before shuffling off.  Another man ran into a nearby restaurant and grabbed a bunch of napkins for her bleeding nose, which turned out to be her bleeding lip.  Someone even offered to call 911, but there was nothing anyone could really do.  I knew by her reaction that she looked worse than she felt. Nothing was broken, or she would have been screaming, “Owwww!  Shit, shit, SHIT!”  She wasn’t broken, just embarrassed.

Later she said she felt bad for me.  But I wasn’t embarrassed.  I don’t give three shits how I looked on that sidewalk, cradling a seventy-something’s head in my lap .  The moment was all hers.  And apparently it made a lot of bad memories surface because she had never told me before that her own mother had caused her anxiety by doing the same things–by falling or getting sick or just losing her life-long poise.  It must suck to get old.

And that brings me to my purpose:  I’m not there yet.  I’m 43, and I’m not young, but I’m not old.  I’m not old old.  I’m in that place where my memories of the first twenty years of my life are a bunch of blurred images of random events; and my memories thereafter are just the highs and lows of adulthood, the boring stuff.  I’ve been “lucky” enough to have taken a bit longer to mature than your average adult and consequently burned through a marriage and lived a sort of renaissance for awhile–which added to the color and texture of my adult memories–but ultimately my adult memories consist of a few highs and lows and a whole lot of static.  Ask me to recall the most exciting moment at my job of twelve years, and it might take me a moment or two to scrape up an insincere answer.

I’m at some new stage in life that I know I didn’t experience in my thirties.  In my thirties, I was busy contemplating why I’d dated most of the men I had.  And in my thirties, I was looking for better.  In my thirties, I started looking at myself through a different lense.  In my forties, I just sit around and wonder random things like what it would be like to sit in my childroom bedroom, or to hang out with my parents when they were young.  I get a chill just thinking about what a conversation with my mother would be like if she could actually hear what was being said to her.  I think about the frailty of human life, and I think about death.  You know.  Stuff.

I appear to be a little younger than I actually am–some of that comes from my aforementioned late-blooming maturity, and some of that comes from decades of moisturizer and sun screen, and good genes–but at the end of the day today, I’m still 43. My mother falls on her face.  My father carries a cane around with him everywhere he goes that expands into a seat.  I’m facing retirement, cancer, kids making bad choices; and a  workout and some revitalizing face cream isn’t gonna wipe that away.

I call my forties the “new forties” because they’re new to me, just as they’re new to any woman who just spent her day in roll-reversal, sitting in a plastic chair in a doctor’s examination room while Mom sits on the table looking uncomfortable.  This kind of stuff didn’t happen in my thirties, or my twenties, or ever before now.  These are the forties, and women’s magazines and the beauty industry might help us to look younger, to act younger; the economy might force us to recreate ourselves again and again, to compete with younger, to think younger; our freedom to make choices for ourselves might allow us live a lifestyle that our mothers’ generation and every one before that couldn’t have imagined. But we’re not  younger.  We’re women in our forties, pragmatically staring at age and death.

Before this decade came along, I thought I really could live in whatever age I managed to sustain.  My thirties were the new twenties, with a few revisions.  But this decade, the forties, it’ll never be the new thirties.  I’m getting old. My knee hurts, I chipped a tooth, and my mom has started falling.  These are the new 40s.