My little Daddy with his parents
Circa 1935
Children and the elderly can have a lot in common, depending on the state of one's mind. I raised my children, and helped with the raising of many other kids. It takes a village. And now I'm tending to my elderly parents. (Well, my mother. Heartbreakingly, Pop died in July.) I can see a certain correlation between caring for your children when they are small and caring for your elderly parents, if they end up with a diminished mental capacity, and mine did.
Here are some similarities: I am responsible for their welfare. I have to be vigilant. They very well may hurt themselves if I'm not on top of my game. I have not eaten a meal without interruption or had a normal phone call in quite some time - unless away from the home.
My parents became very innocent, gullible, and confused in their later years. Poppa's emotions were similar to those of a small child who cannot express a large idea. Momma plays with her dolls in a very realistic way now. She has always loved dolls, but before they were window dressing, just something pretty to see. Now she seems to believe that doll is alive and will scold you if you toss it or pick it up by its foot. I have raised my children and that was not easy. Parenting is a very big job! People justifiably warn you about the terrible twos and about sitting up at 3:00 a.m. because your teen is late getting home from the prom. Raising your children is a huge and difficult task, but lowering your parents? That is much more difficult, and not a single soul warned me so that I could prepare myself. Therefore, I am warning you. This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. It may pass you by; you may escape my fate, but if there is any possibility that you will have to do this - gird your loins in every way they can be girded. My brain is spaghetti. My heart is a black rock. I would not wish this on my worst enemy.
My dad had mini strokes in February of 2021. He was 88 years old. Before those, his only real issue was a pretty terrible hearing problem and some mobility challenges. He was still doing a little bit of gardening and had shared oxheart tomatoes and sugar snap peas with others in the spring and summer of 2020. He was still setting up his own pill box every week. He could come up with great ideas and articulate them to you, even if he didn't hear your response all that well. He told funny jokes and family stories. He implored everyone to know and love Jesus and to be ready for the next world.
After those mini strokes, he had so much confusion that he was taking his night time pills in the middle of the day and became seriously angry when we tried to stop him. The confusion slowly faded but he was left with aphasia and could not understand what we were saying, even if he could hear it. He often spoke in nonsense words and largely lost his nouns and names. He stopped calling me by my name, or by Possum Frog or Baby, which were his nicknames for me. I missed the sound of my monikers on his lips, more than I can express to you. Every female in his life became "Baby Doll" and every male in his life became "Buddy". He once managed, in the calm of an early morning, to ask my sister Sandi, "Why ... can't I ... talk?" She tried to explain the mini strokes and aphasia to him, but who knows if he could grasp it or if her words just sounded like gobbledygook.
His emotions seemed more volatile after the strokes, but perhaps that was just the stress of so rarely being understood, compounded by the fact that he was often looking for things. Daddy never made a big habit of keeping things where he could find them and often laid them down whenever and wherever he was through using them. That is probably the biggest difference between us. In my world everything has a place and everything needs to be in its place. I hate looking for things. I don't know of a bigger waste of my time. If you make a habit of dropping things where you finish using them, I suggest you stop because it will drive you and everyone around you absolutely crazy if you ever have a mini stroke. Daddy was often looking for things. He couldn't remember where he used them last, and he couldn't explain what it was he was searching for so that we could help him, but he usually clearly wanted our help. We learned to rely on motions. We watched his hands for clues. When he was looking for his tape measure, for example, he called it a "belt" but he made the motion of pulling the tape out, and we figured out what he was looking for - that time. His life had been slow and sad and that was hard enough for an active and independent mountain man, but it soon fell even lower. It became frustrating and miserable after the strokes. Communicating with him reminded me of trying to communicate with my children and grandchildren when they were so young they couldn't put the words through their mouth to express their own ideas. It was at this time that I made the first connection between raising my children and lowering my parents.
My father passed away from a blood clot in July of 2021. His quality of life had sank to the point where I felt like it would be a great disservice to him to bring him back, even if I'd had that ability. He had digressed to the point of sitting in his room all day long, just looking forward to bedtime. He had become unable to even put out a few tomato plants and watch them grow, and you could see how defeated and miserable he felt. Always a storyteller, he struggled to ask where someone was. Everything he had ever enjoyed in his life had been taken from him except his family. He could no longer preach, read his bible, garden, putter around the house, call his friends and check on them, cook, or tell his stories. He did manage, haltingly, to tell one last story not long before he died. He saw a picture of himself with his mother and dad when he was about three years old and told me, "That was a puny little blond-haired boy." He struggled to tell me that the family dog had scratched him, just trying to play with him, but it hurt, and Daddy had been trying to climb up in a chair to get away from it when his mother found him and scooped him up and saved him from the dog's claws. Right after that the photo was taken. I will forever cherish that photo and that little story!
Before he passed away, my mother was in pretty bad shape but comparatively content. She it was raised by an alcoholic and child molester. She suffers from mental illness, dementia, emphysema, COPD, asthma, bronchitis, arthritis, neuropathy, anxiety, depression, a nervous stomach, panic attacks, and more. Her vision is very bad and her hearing is abandoning her quickly. But her major problems are probably the fact that she sees life through the opposite of rose colored glasses. What would that be? My mother sees life through shit smeared glasses. Close enough. The world is very frightening and evil to her. She had a moment of pure honesty recently and, when I responded negatively to a question about being afraid of something, she told me, "I've been afraid all of my life". Most days, she will ask me if the house is locked up; sometimes she asks me this many times. If I go anywhere she tells me to watch out for "all those crazy people". She talks about how the world is in such a bad shape that God needs to destroy it sometime soon. She is the most glass-half-empty person I've ever met. Her Glass isn't just half empty it's full of poison.
Add to this that she has always had the lowest pain tolerance of anyone I have ever encountered. Warm water may elicit a shout of pain if she has a sore spot and the water is more than tepid. Her NUMB feet elicit a reaction that is much more pitiful than my own when I had 2nd and 3rd degree burns on my foot and had to have it scrubbed vigorously with sterile water and gauze every day, for 30 days. The bloody water would pour and my pain was mixed with hellfire, but the worst of it would set in about 30 to 45 minutes later. For over an hour, my foot would feel like it was in a fire and nothing much helped. If I raised it up really high that seemed to ease the pain a tad, but let me tell you, that pain was still very formidable. The most that ordeal ever got from me was a gasp now and then. My mother may scream and yell when she gets a B12 shot, or a hangnail, or when you remove a Band-Aid.
Having seen both my parents go through a lot, I can tell you I'm definitely my daddy's daughter. He had open heart surgery, brain surgery, stomach/ulcer surgery, and chopped a huge chunk out of his heel in a motorcycle accident, and they never got much more than gasp out of him either. But Momma's pain tolerance is a different story. When she had my father to look at and to try to communicate with she managed to, for her, keep her spirits up pretty good. Being very independent, he was a terrible patient, but she seemed to shine under the attentions of her husband and her daughters, and much of her old resentments and jealousies of me fell away. (I now understand that I was too much like her mother in law.) Having some core differences, she and I had struggled all our days, but we had the best relationship of our life, for a few months there, when I was caring for both her and Daddy. Once he was gone however, all of that changed. She is now more miserable than he was in June. She is too miserable to have much of a relationship with anyone at all. There is always something wrong, and it is always a big deal. Having dementia means she will give you the same complaint 2 minutes after you have addressed it and done all that you can for it. Having dementia also means, at this point, her mind is pretty young and simple. She does get excited about the sunshine most mornings, but that doesn't last very long. She enjoys her baby doll and will ask you 45 times a day (if that's an exaggeration it's not much of one) if you think it is beautiful. We have put bird feeders on her windows with two-way mirrors so the birds cannot see her. This way they are close enough for her to see with her poor eyesight. They come and feed early and late each day. Occasionally she talks to them and talks about how beautiful they are, but more and more often she is oblivious.
She asks the same questions over and over all day everyday:
Where is Poppy?
(Momma, he's with Jesus. Poppa has been in Heaven for six months now.)
Why didn't anyone tell me?
(We did but you have a memory problem. You forget.)
Why is it so cold in here? Can't we afford any coal?
(We have the heat way up. It isn't cold, but you have neuropathy and it makes your feet and knees feel numb, and that makes you think it's cold, but we keep the heater up for you.)
We have any cake?
(Yes. But let's eat some real food first, OK?)
Isn't my baby doll beautiful?
(Yes, she's very beautiful, Momma.)
Who is gonna sleep in here with me tonight?
(I am, Momma. You and me: we're roommates.)
Likely, this is where she asks again:
Where is Poppy? Or says, "What are we gonna do without Poppy?" (She thinks we're going to freeze to death or lose the house.)
If she makes statements they are 99% of the time negative. Here are a few examples:
My feet are so cold!
{Neuropathy}
My stomach is killing me!
{She's had lights put up her colon and down her throat, and they can't find anything but a little inflammation. They suppose it's a nervous stomach.}
My mommy had such a horrible life!
{True but not good to dwell on.}
My Daddy was so mean to my mommy and she was beautiful. She didn't deserve that!
{She obsesses over beauty. When I was a child, she almost never told me I was kind or smart, but she told me repeatedly, "I wish you were as pretty on the inside as you are on the outside."}
She's nicer now though. Just like my daddy was near the end, she is childlike. But the difference between raising your children and lowering your parents, is that of hope. If your 2 year old draws all over the walls with crayons you may be very upset. But there's a part of you that hopes that will never happen again, and a part of you knows that someday you can tell this story to the child and they will laugh with you because they will have outgrown that sort of mistake. You can teach them, so your disappointment seems to have a purpose. You are raising them higher. If my mother makes a mistake, there is no point in being disappointed. There's no point in having a conversation about it. She is only going to get worse. She cannot remember it if you instruct her on why she should not do that. You can I raise her. You have no choice but to lower her. I guess I have a problem too, because remembering that she will not remember seems to be very hard for me. I knee-jerk try to teach her things (try to RE-teach her things.) I try to raise her when I am here for the job of lowering. Oh children, it's the saddest and the most exhausting, and the most horrific job in the world. But I am told, that it is also honorable. I am told that if I survive this I will be very proud of myself. Right now all I feel is sadness and exhaustion. My mother jars me awake every 20 minutes or so with violent coughing. She tries to get up and walk around without her walker. I live in fear of another fall and another bone break. And there's nothing much I can do about that. Raising improves. Lowering does not. And why didn't anyone warn me?
