Word: m
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...died almost exactly a year later, on Labor Day weekend, 1996. During that year, I loathed my dad at times, and I'm sure he felt the same way about me. As some men do, he just withered away after she died. He wouldn't let anyone into the house to clean except me. He ran off anyone who tried to help, then complained about loneliness. He picked up women on the bus, talked about getting remarried (always to someone in her 30s or 40s, I noticed), confided details of his marital life that I really didn't want...
Surely, I think, I can reason him out of this. But he looks angry and tells me I'm wrong and relates--in great detail--a late-night meal of takeout chicken we once consumed at my desk when I was working late. "Yeah, Dad, that was me," I tell him. His blue eyes--destroyed years ago by glaucoma and cataracts--stare forlornly back at me. "Well, that's what you keep telling me," he says. He looks sad, confused. He starts making a thin whistling sound, a sign I recognize as his signal of distress...
...m hardly the only one going through this experience. It has become the baby boom generation's latest, and in some ways most agonizing, life crisis: what to do when the parents who once took care of you can no longer take care of themselves. The age wave is mounting: 33 million Americans, an unprecedented 13% of the population, are over 65. Their ranks will more than double by 2030. The number of Americans 85 and older has nearly tripled since 1960, to 4 million, and will more than double that over the next 30 years. Along with that explosion...
...facing the dual pressures of the "sandwich generation": trying to raise young children and take care of aging parents at the same time. That's a problem I don't have to face. Yet with no brothers or sisters to help make the decisions and share the load, I'm facing the whole ordeal alone. Friends console me with tales of sibling squabbles over finances and accusations of who's not spending enough time with Mom and Dad. Others I know are trying to make up for years of seeing their parents only a couple of times a year, over...
...Reported by Aixa M. Pascual/New York, Greg Aunapu/Miami, Leslie Everton Brice/Atlanta, Anne Moffett/Washington and Kermit Pattison/St. Paul