Ready to move out?
"Give me three years," she says firmly. "I'll be ready to move in three years." My mother stands up from the kitchen table. "Now come and look at my list. We've got things to do." She heads briskly into the living room.
I linger at the table, cradling my empty cup, looking out the sliding glass door to the small fenced deck. She has taken this uninspired wooden box and made it bloom: It's crammed with pink geraniums, red begonias and purple petunias. She's even got a flowering dogwood in a little pot. This will be the hardest thing — to give up her garden.
I take a deep breath. I know my parents should leave their home in Brantford, Ont., but for the past three years my 80-year-old mother has been saying, "Give me three years." My father recently had a stroke, and the signs of dementia are unmistakable. Plus, at 84, he's becoming frail; I've seen him trip on the carpeted stairs more than once.
Mom seems to be managing, but it's got to be hard — he needs to know where she is every second. This morning, she went down to the basement to look for something, telling him, "I'll just be downstairs for five minutes."
"Okay," he says.
A moment later, he's at my elbow. "Where's your mother?"
A companion from a local agency comes twice a week to read to Dad, play cards with him, take him for walks, and give my mother a break. But none of their adult children lives close by. For my sister Karen and me, visiting our parents usually involves an overnight trip from Toronto. While we know what we don't want — Dad in a nursing home, Mom driving to see him every day, us visiting only now and then — we have only a vague idea of what we do want.
Don't wait until a crisis
My other sister, Linda, lives in Ottawa. She is an Anglican priest, and works with many families struggling with aging and illness. "The number one mistake families make? They wait too long," she tells me on the phone. "Then there's a crisis and they have to choose a place within 24 hours. I see it over and over again."
I don't want to act like a domineering parent, telling my mother what to do, or use psychological warfare, accusing her of being silly or selfish. I want to push them, but honour them. Can I learn how to balance my parents' autonomy with their safety?
My mother is practical, and for the past few years has been downsizing their possessions. But we continue to circle the subject of them moving, frustrating one another. "He's fine," my mother says defensively, trying not to be annoyed at my questions. I sympathize: How can she admit, even to herself, that she needs help if it means losing control over her life? "I don't want to live with a lot of old people," she states. I have no good response to that, besides feeling guilty.
But one day she says something that makes me sit up and take notice. "We'll have to live in one room," she says, looking around her neat little house in despair.
"Why would you think that?" I ask, surprised. "You'll have at least a one-bedroom apartment." In that moment, I realize I am competing with her image of a nursing home, complete with old people left to wither away in corridors. I can't win against a fixed mental picture — I have to make this real.
