Randi Kreiss

Who will hold our hand when we’re old?

Posted

Dad turns 97 this week. Mom, 93, is making him baked chicken for his birthday dinner. Let us hope she takes the bird out of the plastic wrap this time.

They live on their own, in a gated Florida condo community. My sister and I, who do not live nearby, have arranged for “helpers” every day for a few hours. We visit as often as we can, at least every few weeks.

It isn’t enough. Mom is terribly lonely because Dad is cognitively adrift. For 70 years they have lived a life so interwoven that the boundaries between them blurred long ago and forever.

We get by with a certain amount of mutual “let’s pretend.” When I ask Mom whether to arrange for a painter to touch up the kitchen, she says, “I will ask your father,” when we both know he stopped caring about painters or the kitchen many years ago.

All he really cares about is his Pearlie (my mom). And being left alone to sleep.

The helpers drive my parents to doctors’ appointments, which are their main activity, and take my mother shopping, and help my dad take care of himself. My mother is angry that we don’t do the helping. She is upset that Dad wants to sleep all day.

In Louise Erdrich’s “The Round House,” a family elder in an Ojibwa tribe spends his days in a cot by the window. He sleeps. He says he feels the light from the window and he is happy. My dad is happy, too.

When I was there last week and walked out of the room and then back in again, he said, “Randi, when did you get here?” It’s really a fine way to be when you’re very old — unless you have a life partner who misses the witty, wise and take-charge husband you once were.

Friends tell me what a “blessing” it is for my parents to be living well into their 90s. But extended life does not feel like a blessing to my mom. She says she has lived too long. The care-giving chores are overwhelming her, yet she refuses additional help or a move. We keep arranging services and she keeps throwing people out of the house. We want to honor her wishes, but what she really wishes is for us to live with her or next door. She feels abandoned.

Page 1 / 3