Tag Archives: Old Age

The Dementia Dossier: Just Lazy

Leave a reply

Plantation blinds allow abundant natural light in Mom’s living area.  But after dark she feels exposed, and turns the wood slats to the shut position.  I’m sure the only voyeurs are mule deer, but I understand and agree with her desire for privacy, and her caution.  When I brought Mom’s dinner to her in her recliner one night, she said, “Close the blinds behind me, will you, dear?”  She has a wooden yard stick for precisely the purpose of pushing the slats closed, but using it requires her to stand up from her position of supine comfort.  “Well, that’s your job, Mom,” I reacted, perhaps a little too abruptly.  I have encouraged her to keep up her strength and independence by doing as much for herself as she can.  “Oh, alright, dear,” she responded with a tinge of chagrin.  “I’m just being lazy.”  All the more reason for me not to have immediately acquiesced.  The next day, when I came home from work and sat down, she said, “Get the mail for me, will you, dear?”  The mailman hadn’t come when she went out for the New York Times.  I reminded her that her walk to the mailbox is pretty much her only exercise, and I was sure she could get the mail, there being no snow or ice or rain.  “Oh, alright, dear,” again the subtle rebuke.  “I’m just being lazy.”  And on a Friday morning that I worked from home, she called to me in the kitchen, “Get the newspaper for me, will you, dear?”  I stared hard at her and did not speak.  “Normally I would get it, but you’re here,” she explained.  Precisely, I thought piously through my stare: This is something you can do.  “Oh, alright, dear.  Never mind.  I’ll get it.  I’m just being lazy.”  I am not about to be put to work in compensation for another’s laziness.  But I suspect the issue isn’t so much laziness as it is the comfort of being helped and cared for and even pampered when one is 85 and always tired and life is lonely and every chore seems to take so much energy.

Courage at Twilight: Please Press Mute

3 Replies

Ebbets Field - Wikipedia

Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, played at the old Ebbets Field, and retired to see his team, Branch Rickie’s team, move with O’Malley to Los Angeles.  The Yankees remained, to dominate.  And in 2024 the two historic New York rivals faced each other, for the 12th time, in baseball’s World Series.  Mom cranked the volume to jet-engine level, and the crowd’s roaring me pained my ears.  Dad began to talk, and I could hear neither him nor the announcer, so I waved for Mom to mute the barrage.  The TV remote has grown old, and certain buttons respond only to forceful fat-finger pressing, not that her fingers, or mine, are fat, but the buttons are so small as to defy precision pressure.  She gives the mute button a focused, two-handed effort, leaning forward and stretching her sweatered arms toward the television: surely the closer the remote is to the appliance, the better the remote will work.  “That pitch was a ball.  It was low, and outside.  And he swung at it, and he missed.”  I nodded dully at this intelligence, already two batters old, and waved for Mom to reengage the decibels.  The mute button shows signs of extreme wear, and, again, she strained to shorten the distance those struggling radio waves had to travel.  It seemed to work.  Dad soon began to comment again, this time on a base hit, adding his indecipherable garbling to the crowd’s screaming, and on an unexpressed pretext I exited to the kitchen, perhaps for ice cream.  At the commercial break, when Mom mercifully mutes the aural chaos, I announce how tired I felt, and that I thought I would go to bed.  It was the top of the ninth inning, in game 5, with the score 6-5.  I still don’t know who won the game, or the series.  Evenings are a bit quiet now.  A bit.

(Photo from Wikipedia, used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Lithium-ion

4 Replies

As I walked through the front door after work, Mom approached me with a written list of five things she needed help with. 1a) Dad’s printer would not work.  She was right.  I unplugged it and re-plugged it in, and it worked, but she had clicked the “Print” icon so many times that the resulting print jobs drained the ink dry.  1b) Replace the ink in Dad’s printer.  2) Dad’s gabapentin was about to run out, with no refills, so would I call the prescribing doctor to renew the prescription.  I texted the hospice nurse, who had the medicine delivered to the house.  3) Dad’s glucometer stopped working, so would I go to Walgreens or somewhere and buy him another one—suddenly, after years of not testing his blood glucose levels, he wants to start testing his blood glucose levels, at age 88.  I plugged the glucometer into my computer to recharge the battery as I wrote, and announced heroically that we would not need to buy a new one.  “It has rechargeable batteries!  Isn’t that amazing?”  4) Review the list of distributees for Sarah’s tribute book, which at 52 pages, including 12 color pages, would cost $12.25 a book to copy and bind.  We cut the list of essential persons “who would still want to have the book in 50 years” (I suggested to him that no one would still want the book, or perhaps even be alive, in 50 years) from 60 copies to 40 copies, with the reassurance we could print more, if needed.  5) Write on the calendar the coming weekend’s activities.    As Mom confronted me with the list, I asked a bit testily if I could pee first, because I had drunk too much passion-fruit-flavored ice water before leaving the office, and peeing was my first priority.  Relieved, I set about the tasks, still in my hat and tie.  Mom invited me to look in Dad’s office at how she had rearranged Dad’s power tool batteries and their chargers.  Dad had kept her awake the night before repeating suddenly anxious expressions about the lithium-ion batteries shelved in his office closet—shelved by me, already responding to his anxieties about the batteries touching each other or their chargers and starting a 1200-degree F fire that would burn the house down, shelved by me alternating the chargers and the batteries, nothing touching anything else, with the tools far away in the garage.  But he had forgotten, and had begun to panic again about lithium-ion infernos, and after midnight had sent Mom downstairs in her nightgown to redistribute the chargers and batteries more safely, so there was no chance they would touch.  My completed or in motion, I examine with some confusion the closet shelf, now bare of batteries, and looked toward Dad’s L-shaped desks to see the chargers and batteries spaced there at distances of three feet each from the other.  “Looks great, Mom.  They’re certainly not touching each other.  Nothing to worry about.”

Courage at Twilight: I Really Want To Go

2 Replies

1953-plymouth-cranbrook

Old patterns seem to reassert themselves without my even noticing.  I had pulled and raked weeds for three hours in 95 degrees.  The gardens looked beautiful, and I definitely did not.  At 3 pm I took Mom to the grocery store to cross off our lists.  At 4 pm we put the groceries away in various pantries, cupboards, refrigerators, and freezers.  At 5 pm began the peeling and slicing of vegetables for roasting: yams, carrots, onions, potatoes, mushrooms (plus sliced Kielbasa).  At 7 pm dinner was served to grateful parents who cannot cook their own.  At 8 pm came the washing of dishes and cleaning of kitchen.  And I was so glad to be done with my work for the day.  But at 8 pm Mom asked if we could go for a walk now, and, in fairness to her, I had hinted earlier in the day a willingness to take them on an evening walk.  Now, I complained about having been on my feet the last five hours and about wanting my day’s labors to be done.  “I really want to go,” she persisted sweetly, and I felt my weak attempt to draw boundaries and wind down my Saturday giving way to a kindly old lady’s pining to get out of the house, to feel the evening air on her face, to see trees in their multitudinous shades of green, to wave to the waving neighbors, to revel in freedom and calm and beauty with her arms raised exultantly to the sky.  So, out the door we trundled.  Nick drove by in his vintage Mustang, waiving, and smiled at our “We love your car!” and said he’d be back with something she would really enjoy seeing.  Every night I sigh wearily, wanting my day’s labors to end, and there is always more work to be done.  I am remembering back to Saturday mornings pulling weeds for three hours in 95 degrees, to the days of two decades of raising my seven children, when I often fell asleep comforting a crying child who himself soon slept sprawled and drooling on my chest, when I would seethe over dirty greasy soapy dishes at midnight, when the next day’s unbearable stresses already came crushing.  “I love it!” Mom exclaimed after passing an enormous blue spruce twenty feet across and forty tall.  I confessed to enjoying our walk, too, and heard her relieving sigh.  Boundaries feel selfish to me.  Every boundary I draw limits another’s needs and my service to those needs.  Trying to draw lines leaves me feeling guilt for others’ disappointments.  But a life without boundaries, as I well know, will leave me empty and dry and weary and resentful and depressed—all used up.    I am getting a little better at saying, “That will have to wait until tomorrow,” Mom or Dad.  Our walk finished at 9 pm.  The doorbell rang at 9:10, just as I sat down to rest.  Nick had come back, this time with his 1949 Plymouth (blue).  “What do you think of her!” he asked.  His gray mustache grew from his lip down his cheeks to well below his jawline.  “It’s a Plymouth!” she impressed him, hanging on my arm as we walked slowly to the rumbling car at the curb in the dark.  She told him the story of how she and Dad as newlyweds had driven their 1953 Plymouth (green) for five days from Salt Lake City to New York City, in 1963, at a top speed of 40 miles per hour, on local and state roads before interstates.  The city had alternate side of the street parking rules, and Dad sleepily descended the apartment stairs at 5 every morning to move the car to the other side of the street to avoid tickets and towing.  After three days of that, they decided they didn’t need a car in Greenwich Village, put a “For Sale $50” sign in the window, and sold the big rounded old Plymouth to a clerk at the corner grocery, who waxed it up and proudly cruised the Big Apple in his new Plymouth.  I shook Nick’s hand.  I became so weary raising my family, my love for them notwithstanding, and I am weary again now, my love for Mom and Dad notwithstanding.  My work feels never done.  That is the human experience: the work to be done always outpaces the time and energy to do it, and we tire despite ennobling lives.  The thermometer reached 102 that day, the same day an email came from the company that hangs our Christmas lights on the house, asking for a deposit.  How strange to think about Christmas in 102 degrees in July, waiting for parts to repair the air conditioning, grateful for refrigerators and freezers and ice and little water cooler fans bedside.  We will forego the house lights this year.  Is there irony in my hanging three August calendars on my bedroom wall, one for Push-ups, one for Planks, and one for Prayer?  They can wait for August, I decided, and dropped into bed before 10.

(Picture of 1953 Plymouth from Dragers.com, used under the fair use doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: “R” Mountain

2 Replies

Sweat trickled down my arms and dripped from my fingertips, and my growing girth stretched my shirt against its buttons. I shall be thin(ner) again: I have signed onto the galactic S.U.G.A.R. treaty (I cannot remember what the acronym represents) and have foresworn all things donut-cake-cookie-candy.  Ice cream once a week is an important negotiated exception.  Breaking for breath, the trumpeted cackles of sandhill cranes float up from the Snake to where I stand on the rim of the world’s largest tuff cones, the Menan Buttes, ancient volcanos formed by magma boiling upward through groundwater.  A pair of red-tailed hawks screech overhead, circling each other on warm currents, the same screech TV commercials ascribe to the mighty magisterial bald eagle because it sounds cooler and more mighty and magisterial than the eagle’s pinched laughter.  On this high Idaho desert my four sons have struggled at university, jogged in fifteen below zero Fahrenheit wrapped and bundled, set climbing routes at the gym, served smokey sauced meat at Blisters BBQ, rafted class 4s on the Salmon, discovered the spirituality of a stone labyrinth laid out in the sagebrush, found dear wives and seen babies birthed, and graduated.  They make me proud, because I love them, come what will. And when I walk through the front door to shouts of “Welcome Home!!” Mom and Dad have me sit right down to tell them about it all.  They will not remember what I tell them.  Dad commented to Mom last week, “I’m having trouble remembering peoples’ names,” and she answered, “Whose name?”  “Nobody’s name!” he retorted: “I can’t re-mem-ber….”  They won’t remember what I told them, but they will remember my pride in my sons’ personalities and my happiness in my sons’ successes and how beautiful were the photos of the high Idaho desert and the Snake River and the alfalfa pivots and the views from “R” Mountain.

The core of the volcanic tuff cone.

Views of the Snake River to the North and South