Driving the Crooked Nail
May 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment
I knocked softly on the door and entered. My father sat alone in the flickering light of the television. I knew my mother was somewhere close by, probably enjoying herself at a game of word play with other residents, relaxation and stimulation much needed.
“How are you?” I greeted him. “Sleepy.” At twenty after eleven in the morning, I guessed he was more bored than sleepy. But this was his choice, simply to sit, his memory fading in and out like the light from the TV screen. “What are you watching?”
“I’ve got a chicken here.” I smiled. It sounded too much like an old joke with a predetermined punch line for me to continue quizzing him. At least he wasn’t consumed by mindless junk, but rather history, nature, science, the building of anything and everything. As his own clock winds down, he still needs to know what makes the world tick.
In my mother’s absence, I thought I might empty the cardboard box that usurped much of the floor space in their tiny kitchen. After all, my parents had been in their new living quarters for almost two months. Filled to overflowing, the box was the last of the lot from their move, bursting with framed images and what-nots in assorted sizes. Collages of children and grandchildren, favorite greeting cards preserved under glass, handicrafts stitched and framed so many years ago lay jumbled together with citations, awards and other bits and pieces of almost 68 years of marriage and family.
We’d talked a little, my mother and I, about the contents of the box. Each time I’d visited, there had always been more pressing things then sorting out the remnants of the past. Attending to their present and future needs took priority. My mother had pointed out a few favored pieces. There was no hurry, she said. She was rather enjoying the lack of clutter in their new surroundings. The expanse of bare white walls basked in calm, untouched, like a beach buffed smooth by the receding tide.
“What do you think, Dad? Think we could hang a few of these pictures?” This, I asked of a man who loves to sit and watch the water but can barely see a barge approaching. The slim silhouette of a sailboat, so narrow, slips by his eyes, unseen. Yet, I know him to be patient and accepting of his limitations. He is happy there by the water, grateful to hear the screech of the gulls, though he can only sit and listen, their plumage lost in gray. He perked up at the idea of accomplishing a task, happy to assist as best he could. The TV shimmered, now forgotten.
I picked up the first framed print. “The Prayer Lady,” my mother has named her. It is a simple, nondescript image of brown on brown. A peasant woman, her head bowed over a wooden bowl, hands clasped, whispers a silent blessing. Thank God for all that we have and all that is good. No wonder it is one of my mother’s favorites.
Uh, oh. The gnarled yellow string that served as a hanger on the back of the frame hung loose on one end. I placed it in my father’s hands. He ran his thick fingers over a rogue staple. “What’s this?” I described how it was bent and needed repair. “Get me a knife.” Now, this was an “uh, oh” moment. A knife? For the almost-blind guy? A butter knife couldn’t hurt—much. I delivered as requested. My father, working his way mostly by touch, slid the tip of the knife under the offending staple and leveraged it out; a tiny job, a huge success. He held the frame steady while I pounded in a new clasp. Working by his side, memories came flooding back. How I learned to turn a screw and ply a hammer; the day he taught me to turn and descend a ladder backwards; when he showed me how to salvage nails from old boards, extract them and pummel them out to a usable state of almost straight.
Repaired, the prayer lady was quickly hung in the spot my mother had chosen earlier. With no intention of hanging items willy-nilly all over my mother’s pristine walls, I pulled another identified favorite from the box. “What do you think? Where should we put this one?”
“Oh, yes. She loves that one.” How did he know this? I never knew they spoke of such material things. “Over there.” My father, the decorator, was new to me. In all his productive years, he had built shelves and beds, monkey bars and wooden stilts, even a paddle wheel canoe, but aesthetics was never in his repertoire. He built for function not for beauty. When the final crooked nail was lodged, the project was complete; paint was extraneous.
I allowed my father to take command, directing me to hang a piece of artwork here, a commemorative plaque there.
“How’s that?” I stepped back to peruse my work. My father shook his head.
“Move it to the left. And it needs to go up, even with the other picture.” Three quarters of an inch; how could my father see the discrepancy? He can barely see the daffodils in spring and, for him, the tiny croci sprout invisible. What he misses in the details, he makes up for in examining raw edges of light and dark, in the desire to align his world at right angles. He remains, as he has always been, a man of black and white. Do what’s asked, complete the task, no room for error. For this, he has my ultimate respect. I pulled the dastardly small picture hanger from the wall, banged it back to nearly straight, and rehung the picture. All is well in my world.
If Birthday Wishes Were Horses, How Far We Would Ride
April 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment
“What would you like to do for your birthday?” I hoped my mother would choose something special to mark her 92nd birthday. Instead, she met my question with silence. “Nothing?” I guessed her reticence of a reply to mean she’d rather ignore the milestone. This growing old is not a passage she appreciates. She’d rather opt out, click on a link at the bottom of life’s junk email. Not that she’d choose to end the journey; she’d simply enjoy a different route. But there is no escaping it, save for the end of the road.
What would I do for her to celebrate the occasion? Really, what wouldn’t I do? A special luncheon or dinner out comes and goes, yet another meal. A play? The opera? I wondered if she and my father would be comfortable sitting for hours in a theater. A road trip would be her choice, I imagine, though my parents have just begun what we’ve deemed their “land cruise,” this new life at assisted living. The costs are astronomical and we’ve yet to wrap our heads around it. How can we justify the economics of time away, leaving the “free” meals and living arrangements for the expense of a vacation? We will. I have to believe we will, at some point. I long to gather my parents up to escape the confines of their daily routine for new adventures. For now, their new reality means adjusting to scheduled transportation, finding new doctors, adjusting to someone else’s agenda.
Has it been years, already, since my father and mother hit the road for one last jaunt? I remember that trip she had to make to prove a point, the packing up and driving 200 miles north directly through a major metropolitan area to attend a conference. She was 89 then. My father had stopped driving years before having surrendered his license to low vision. My mother, long known as the “nagigator” in the passenger seat, the woman who had guided them for ten of thousands of miles of roadtrips, took the wheel out of necessity–or pure stubbornness? Of late, my father has begun to ask if she might get behind the wheel again, if they could take it slow would she drive them one more time across the country? She is restless but too wise for that undertaking.
I dream of the cherry blossoms in Washington DC and the World War II memorial, one of the few sites they haven’t visited in that city where they were married nearly 68 years ago. I want to chug around Tangier Island with them in a golf cart and listen to the cadence of the language in a tiny spot in the country they somehow missed in their decades of discovery. I wish to load them on a cruise ship where they could enjoy new vistas from the deck, a fresh horizon every morning. We would brave encounters with Komodo dragons, watch the sun set at the Taj Mahal. What wouldn’t I do for my parents to celebrate their lives? I would fly them to the moon. Really, I would.
Out with the Old
April 11, 2012 | 1 Comment
It wasn’t a difficult couple of hours. Today, we were simply pushing paper. The files had already been sorted and depleted during a less savage culling before the move. No, it wasn’t that difficult to divide the old from the new, the freshly prepared documents so much whiter and less dog-eared than the earlier versions. This round of paperwork was less emotional, more methodical. But so much had changed in a few short weeks.
My mother sat with file folders scattered at her feet, a notepad in her lap and a pen in hand. My father sat quietly in his chair. Legal documents had required redrafting upon their move to assisted living. Periodically, my mother rose from her chair and disappear to the bedroom where she had arranged a filing cabinet. She reappeared with another folder full of copies. When too many lay stacked on the floor, she began to hesitate. “Are these the old or the new ones?”
I thumbed through the pages. “Old. I’ll take them and shred them.” Above all, she needs to know things are in order. In a matter of days in this new, secure environment, I had seen a change in my mother. The old fire is sparking. Her burden of caregiving to my father lessened, she appears more relaxed than she has in many months. Maybe years. And yet, she also shows a willingness to accept assistance that, before, she would have denied.
Of course, we’d rather have passed the hours on a less tedious task but, these days, it is not how we spend our time together that matters but rather the mere fact we are able to do so that pleases us both. I was sorry my visit conflicted with a word game activity she enjoys, but glad that she’d attended her exercise class before I arrived. Stretching her mind and body in new directions, my mother–nearly 92–is beginning a life anew. For the very first time, she is able to admit her limitations. Not yet ready to completely hand over the reins, she just wants a little help with her giddy-up once in a while.
We moved on from paperwork to internet accounts. My mother picked up a stack of index cards and meticulously recorded user IDs and passwords for the necessary websites. She made note of the online bookmarks I created for her. No paperless payments for her, though, lest her stack of file folders lie empty. In the coming months, she will habitually check each account, double checking her paper bills with the online status. She amazes me with her meticulousness, even now, though she displays a bit of compulsion, this need to order things, to keep her stacks of paper lined up, to keep her ducks in a row. God bless her, I say, that she remains capable.
There was no sadness in our organizational tasks this morning. The job well done, I kissed my mother and then my father goodbye. Arrivederci. Knowing they would be safe and cared for until I saw them again, I departed with a thick file of papers destined for the shredder under my arm. It was not until later, when I stood before the shredder as it growled to life that the tears came. The papers crackled as the blades cut them to ribbons, as dry and brittle as the skin of the elderly. I watched as my mother’s familiar signature receded into the metal crevasse, again and again, pages of her life fluttering away to nothing. I hit the shut off button, the day’s task complete, and chided myself for my silly tears. My parents have yet to be filed away. Their move to assisted living is simply a repositioning, a strategical maneuver, a cleansing of the files to make way for further recording of two lives well lived.
Where is the “Care” in “Healthcare”
January 30, 2012 | Leave a Comment
The conversation was brief with many marked pauses on my part as I tried to stifle a scream.
“My father was seen a week ago at your office. He was put on Lasix for some crackling in his lungs but appears to be getting worse. He’ll be at your office this afternoon for a scheduled test. Is there someone available to listen to his chest?” I stressed his age and health history–something I would hope not to have to do, since I was speaking to his own primary care office. ” He will be 95 in a couple weeks. He has a history of pneumonia.”
Beep… beep… beep… the phone chirped like a heart monitor while I was put on hold.
“His primary care doctor is concerned; she doesn’t know what is going on.”
She’s concerned. I’m concerned. Which is why I’m calling–to find out what is going on.
“My father will be at your office today,” I repeat. “My parents are in their 90s. They have already arranged transportation for today for a prearranged office for another matter. Could someone see him?”
“No. We have nothing available. They should go to the emergency room.” Should they fly on a magic carpet?
“Could he be seen sometime tomorrow then?” They will have transportation available tomorrow.
“No.”
Really? Nothing can be arranged to postpone the scheduled routine visit–he will be at the office anyway– for a look-see by someone capable to assess a pressing health concern? I swallow hard to suppress the scream.
“No. They need to go to the emergency room.”
And so, I hung up to try to rearrange the day; to urge my mother to make the extra trip to the emergency room; to convince them that making these new arrangements will not “inconvenience” anyone; to impress upon both my mother and my father that he needs to be seen by a doctor, despite the indifference of their primary care office. And I scream so loud inside my head that my brain surges against my scull like a tsunami, breaking out as tears that surge uncontrollably down my cheeks.
Where is the care? How has this system gone so terribly wrong?
Assistsed Living for Elderly Inmates–Is this a Joke?
January 19, 2012 | Leave a Comment
The excesses of government are a hot topic in this year before an election. Social service agencies and private citizens have tightened their belts to muddle through this floundering economy; how is it possible, then, that the governor of Massachusetts has proposed overhauling the prison system to include assisted living facilities to provide comfort to our aging inmates? What can he possibly be thinking, when so many of our oldest-old are currently without comprehensive caring or safe and decent housing options?
The cost of assisted living facilities is Massachusetts is off the dial. I know this because I have recently visited a half dozen or more such facilities in search of a proper environment for my own nonagenarian parents. Their nose-to-the-grindstone generation is left wondering where to find suitable, affordable housing to comfortably live out the balance of their lives while Governor Patrick plans to pamper felons in their golden years. Shame on you, Governor. Consider, first, the law abiding elderly who led productive lives and who never spent beyond their means. Consider those who served their country, who selflessly raised a generation of boomers and who believed that if they worked hard and saved their pennies, all would be right in the world. Put some of that creative thinking to better use to provide our oldest-old with the dignity and respect they deserve, a safe and affordable environment for those who are unable to age in place. Please, think again, Mr. Governor.
Travel a Bridge Between in Norway
February 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Highway 64 in Norway: five miles; 8 bridges; years in the construction; one of the most amazing road trips in the world! Check it out in this (uncredited) PowerPoint presentation: Â
Seniors Coping With Loss
February 11, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Once again, the NY Times has generated a thoughtful article in their health section, The New Old Age. Seniors deal with loss on many levels, not the least of which is the passing of their friends and contemporaries–a type of survivor guilt, if you will. Paula Span explores the topic in her touching post “Words for Seniors Facing Loss.”