A physician by the first name of Cynthia (same name as my deceased sister), wrote, “When my father died, although he was beloved, we all experienced a lifting of the burden through which we all had been living. [He had multiple medical illnesses, a fractured hip, and dementia. We were very involved in his extensive medical care for the last years of his life, and he was in our home for the last weeks of his life, where he died.] Three years ago, my mother was diagnosed with cancer and we took care of her in our home for a year and a half until she died. Although I would have done nothing differently, and am glad we were able to care for her, her last months were difficult. She was angry at her diagnosis, angry at us, and alternatively loving and angry. The phrase ‘heavy blanket of misery’ is so apt. She died a year ago; I miss her so terribly, and feel so bad that I didn’t do more for her, but I still don’t know what more I could have done. The depression into which I slipped upon her diagnosis still sits on me daily like a heavy blanket of misery. Caring for my parents at home was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, and I still have not recovered.”

While getting increasingly exhausted, middle-aged men and women (like myself and Cynthia—baby-boomers we are called, although I’m amongst the youngest of that group) in growing numbers are watching a mother or father (or both) grow more helpless with each passing day—a transitioning from full independence to full dependence (sometimes astonishingly quickly) until the role reversal puts us squarely in charge of everything—juggling our parents’ increasing needs, frequent ER visits and medical emergencies (sometime several times a month or even every week), consults with lawyers perhaps to obtain committeeship papers or other legal advice and then dealing with the public trustee and other gov’t departments, dealing with the things that go wrong in even a good care-facility, the sense that no “good period” lasts for more than a few days and following through on all the other parts of our lives with our own family units (so that nobody, it seems, ever gets our full attention), and so and so on…

As another person wrote, “A health issue comes up for your parent and you have to drop everything and tend to it. Sometimes people don’t understand the strain or effort that goes into it all…and how taxing it can be on even the strongest and most stable marriage.”

Yes, when elderly parents decline, there are of lot of issues to deal with—the falls, the impacted bowels, the bedsores and rashes, the drugs that make your parent psychotic, the living will, the POA…and all the other issues around ourselves and within our own family unit.

Watching elderly parents adjust to unwelcome limitations and dependency is not a new issue but it is reaching more and more of us as we age—a lot of us are parenting our parent(s).

And caring for them and attending to their needs can be an exhausting commitment.

But in facing the decline and death of our parents we are also given the opportunity to face our own mortality…to have the chance to think about our future and set up a care plan for ourselves, ahead of time, and gather resources around ourselves in order help ease the burden on our children when WE start to ail and approach death.

Take the time to plan!

Why not start now!

Do you have an updated will? …A living will? … A designated POA? …

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James