Dealing with my family: April 2009 Archives

In All That Jazz, Director Bob Fosse features a comedian who's rift is the 7 Stages of Grief.

Anger, denial, bargaining, depression and loneliness, Mom and Dad are still some ways from acceptance; they're grieving their youth and their life.

I chatted with Mom this afternoon; she was agitated and quick to tears. She wants to move home, wherever that is. And "what about my taxes?"; she has so many worries.  I heard them all, "I've got stuff in Treelakes!  I've got to get back to sell the cottage!  I miss my friends!"  They're not harmonizing with their new lifestyle, living with my sister's family.  It was a little unsettling when she mentioned 3 different times, "I have guns!". She was slow to pick up on the analogy that assisted living in Palo Alto might be like Treelakes, inside 4 walls with lots of new friends. "I won't go!"

"All I do is walk, about a mile, twice a day!" That's good, let's extend that to 3 times a day. She did say that coming off her high dosage prednisone was a challenge to her mental health.

I told her that since she's been a great wit for so many years that I was going to argue back with her and dispute some of the "I can handle my medicines and my life" claims. "Who ratted us out? Was it Cynthia? Who said we can't take care of ourselves?" How 'bout I tell you who's not on that list, it'll be shorter. Uncle Art, Aunt Pat, Cynthia and Paul, they all called to alert us to your declining situation in Florida.

I remembered Dad last summer, when he saw me arguing with Mom, he advised, "let it pass, it'll pass". Then Mom hung up on me.

Are things settling down for my parents? They still talk incessantly of how they must return to TreeLakes in FL to retrieve some valuable possessions. As if sorting through these keepsakes would bring a corresponding order to their lives. My sister Kathleen thinks Dad must have some cash hidden under a mattress. I expect to find that matching pair of Woodstock Inn wine glasses; they were a gift 4 years ago and you'd have thought they were made of gold the way they were repacked and squirreled away, then next summer when I'm looking for a decent wine glass, they're no where to be found. "They must be at TreeLakes", Mom suggests.  What's the point of saving things if you never get to enjoy them? Like the heavy table cover on the old oak dining table, when do you get to take it off and admire the wood grain?

My mother has recovered from the pneumonia and the gash in her leg that required 17 stitches, but a broken tooth is the latest lament. "The dentist wants to see me again in 3 weeks", and so life takes on its predictable pattern, going from one doctor's appointment to the next. It's surprised me how easily they abandoned their insistence to fly away when they first had stitches to remove (2 weeks) then new hearing aids (1 week) and now pneumonia and a new crown, but that's the pace of their lives.