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How old do you think were when the transition from your parents worrying about your health to you worrying about their health happened?
I'd say late 20s for me, not very long back really. They're in their 60s now. I suppose it's confounded by the fact we're all doctors, and I have a (small) degree of confidence that they can look after themselves and vice versa. Still have to yell at my dad to get his heart checked, and my mom to up her semaglutide dose, but they need to check in on me too so it all cancels out.
At the age of 49 I received a call from home. It was morning --a Saturday in Japan, so evening in my home state. It was my mom. My dad had begun having petit mal seizures several years before. We didn't know why, or at least the doctors didn't explore why or venture a guess why, though maybe they did in adjusting his medication for what I believe was diabetes, but they ended up giving him carbamazepine as treatment, which he would eventually refer to as his crazy pills: "Your mother is always reminding me to take my crazy pills." My father was over a decade older than my elderly mother at this point, so I tended to have my radar tuned to his zigs and zags. But I never really worried much about his health beyond that. He was robust, actively volunteering to deliver food to "the old folks" when he himself was 80, went to church, took daily walks, all the benign yet pro social activities that suburban old white men do. COVID would change all that but that's an entirely different story. This story is about the phone call from my mom where she told me, in what seemed an almost embarrassed voice (she always tended to laugh a lot, and there was some ghost of a laugh here as well) that she was entering hospice, and that she loved me, and that I shouldn't worry about her.
This was typical of my uncommunicative family, but x 10. Usually in the weeks and months before someone enters hospice care you have visited them bedside in a hospital, or sent them get well letters, or heard about their disease from friends and felt like you really should take them some flowers. But no. My mom had gone to a doctor for back pain I suppose a few weeks earlier and been diagnosed with Stage IV multiple myeloma. They'd given her less than a year, though soon she would find researchers coming out of the woodwork to suggest possible new treatments. She refused them. God would take care of her. Which of course eventually he did, though not as she had perhaps hoped and expected.
And so it was that I flew home and left my work situation dangling, and sat by her bedside in a large room richly panelled in dark wood with a view into a patio dappled in sunlight and small birds. She sometimes just kept the TV on. She wore a wig or headscarf. I had seen her not more than two years earlier planting flowers with my very young (at the time) second son. The whole situation seemed unreal. Bone cancer (yes not solid tumor, but still cancer.) She had never smoked, and probably had no more than five sips of alcohol her entire life. And here she lay, a shell of her former happy self, the same kind of resigned Patience in the face of impossible hardship that I had seen in her sisters, my aunts, when horrible family situations had been discussed in the past. No outright tears, no wailing against unfairness, no anger. Just an acceptance of what, in some form or another, awaits us all I suppose (perhaps not you, @selfie.)
I could stay a week. My mom had stopped eating or drinking, so the hospice nurses were not optimistic about how long she would hold on. The hospice chaplain I knew from childhood --she had been in my Sunday school class and was a year older than I was, but quite beautiful. Blonde, blue eyed, trim, with a calm demeanor; you felt you could lie with your head in her lap and listen to her speaking and never need anyone or anything else. She asked me how I was doing. "Fine. How are you doing?" I asked. She laughed and told me I was terrible. Michelle. That was her name.
The two days before I was to return to Japan someone had brought pork chops to the hospice kitchen. This was a place full of donated food--cookies, key lime pies, doughnuts, fried chicken, cornbread, sometimes fruits, all sorts of soft drinks and coffees and teas. But it took the pork chops and gravy to rouse my mother from what was supposed to be her death bed, her following hand over hand the hallway railing. And she ate.
I came back here. She would last another ten months--my mother was the only person I know whom hospice kicked out. She returned home. From my father's account it wasn't pretty. And in the end, as one does, she succumbed. My father told me he was praying for God to take her at the end. He talked about the death rattle, told me it's not something he ever wanted me to hear, and certainly was happy I hadn't heard it from my mother. Seven years later I'd hear it from him, but that, again, is another story.
Anyway I was 49.
For whatever it's worth, I'm sorry. I'd say that words are worth very little, but that would be a cynical lie. I know I've been in bad places and kind words even from a stranger helped.
My grandpa isn't all there anymore. At 96 and change, the actuarial tables aren't looking good. But he's at home, and goddammit, he might have spent his life at hospital but if he goes, he'll go at home. Or stay home, surrounded by people who love him. That would include me, if work lets me fly away. This is a grim hypothetical I'm forcing myself to confront instead of unaddressed, and I'm worried about my parents because I'll be damned if they don't another 20 years of reasonably healthy life. Might as well hand in my badge and walk away if I can't do that.
Hoping you're okay now, and the grief has been dulled by the passage of the time. Too much to expect it to just go, it won't.
All is well, thank you. At this point I'm projecting forward to what my own sons will deal with. At some point thunderstorm golfing seems viable. Nothing like a lightning strike to end it quickly, and with a bit of oomph, all while sparing one's family from witnessing the slow decline. Just a joke. We, none of us know when the bell will toll.
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