My parents suddenly appeared in San Francisco one weekend in January 2006 with a desperate plea that I become more involved in their lives as my dad expected to die from cancer within the year. My residence in Sodom-by-the-Sea, so far away from them, had not been an accident, but rather where I ended up when I fled.
I moved half a continent closer to them by going to graduate school in Illinois. New drugs unexpectedly kept my dad alive for five years. When graduate school was done, I moved to Atlanta to try to help. That attempt proved to be folly, and served mostly to remind me why I’d moved as far away from them as possible. So I accepted a job in Nashville, close enough to drive down a couple of times a month, but far enough away to have some space.
During his illness, my dad and I spoke at great lengths, and became friends in a way that had not been possible when he was full of vim and venom. Before my dad ultimately died in December 2010, he carefully crafted his estate. Because he was aware of the intractable disagreements that I tend to have with my mom, he made sure that there was enough money tucked away for her to be cared for, and for me to continue my education, if I chose, without me having to even talk to the woman again. His working out the kinks in the relationship between him and me and his ability to plan for the care of his wife of 35 years are much to his credit.
My dad did hope I’d try to work it out with my mom. Partially as a result, I’ve tried hard to balance not really liking her with a sense of being an honorable person. At first, I thought I’d spend a year settling my dad’s estate, and then a year settling my mom into a living situation where she could live independently without a lot of extra help. I figured that after that, I could go back to adventuring and following my bliss. It’s now been five years since my dad died. We settled the estate in a year, but finding a situation for my mom to live where she doesn’t need a lot of crisis intervention has still not happened.
Since my dad’s death, she has complained that she can’t keep up with the house she lives in. I have sent her on dates with real estate agents to look at small homes and condos. I have gone on appointments to see senior living apartments. I insisted she remodel the house so she could live on one level.
More recently, she was hospitalized for heart trouble, and then again for falling flat on her face. I spent about half my time there in Atlanta over the course of a month, both in her home and in the hospital.
I insisted then she look at assisted living facilities and independent living facilities. After a month of calling her every day to insist that she go, she relented. She would look, but she would not consider moving. When her intransigence became obvious, I then proceeded to chip away at her resistance to home care workers and other services. We argued about how much care she needed. We argued about whether she could still drive, and whether she should have a neuropsychological evaluation to assess, among other things, reaction times for driving. Along with a family friend, I paid out-of-pocket to have a social worker evaluate her situation and make recommendations.
It’s always an argument, though. She argues, relents, accepts, and then, some time later, denies that she ever was difficult about the situation. The real fun begins when she doesn’t care to remember how difficult she was when she needed help last. There was the time when the tree fell on her house and she had to be convinced to move out. There was the time she had to be convinced to pay a contractor to fix the house after the tree fell on it. Or the time that I prevailed upon her to get a landscaper to actually cut down the poke weed and other pest plants that had grown up in her flower beds. The relationship is adversarial, but she doesn’t remember how difficult it was when she expresses her disappointment in me as a son and caregiver.
At one time, she had to get a therapist to remind her that I was not a bad son. More recently, she’s taken to saying that she wished she had a daughter who lived in Atlanta who would take care of her. All of this tends to indicate there is not some magical amount of care on my part that will satisfy her.
I have tried to develop a relationship or even friendship with the woman despite all the differences. After months of goading, she came to visit me in Nashville. We once also went to a week-long program at John C. Campbell. But it’s never fun or easy. Perhaps I’m to blame, but also we are talking about a person who told me, even when I was an adult, that she was my mother always, but would never be my friend.
My life has now been shaped for a decade by eldercare. There are many adventures I want to undertake that I have put off because of my mother’s recurring crises. If my parents’ decline has taught me anything, it’s that life is short, and we all too soon reach a point of disability and death. But I do not know when I will be free to do these things.
This blog post has no moral and no particular end. I’ll probably keep on doing as I’ve done before, which is begrudgingly trudging to Atlanta to fish my mom out of crises and wishing all the time she were my friend instead of my adversary. I hope mentioning this helps someone to see that you can love family, or even be obliged by family, but not like it very much.
