Word: moms
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...relationship with Mom improved, my dad and I had knock-down-and-drag-outs over her treatment. He and the doctor wanted her in a hospital. She wanted to die at home. Dad wouldn't, couldn't pay for round-the-clock nurses. Part-time aides came and went, unable to take the hours and the unrelenting attention Mom needed. After she had a tracheotomy and required a tube down her throat, I had to learn how to apply suction to the tube when she felt the saliva backing up--a procedure most of the aides were either unable...
...moment when we must take charge of Mom's and Dad's lives is a wrenching rite of passage for baby boomers, who in many ways are still struggling to grow up. "As a generation, we haven't seen much death, and we haven't experienced a great deal of hardship ourselves," says psychologist Mary Pipher, author of the best-selling book Reviving Ophelia and the recently published Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders (Riverhead Books, $24.95). "We weren't in a Depression. We weren't in World War II. For many baby boomers, this...
...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 Christmas turkey or at summer picnics. No matter; we all end up feeling guilty...
...descent into elder-care hell began in 1995, when my mother, then 69, was found to have Lou Gehrig's disease. It robbed her first of her speech (and boy, how she had loved to talk!), then of movement of her limbs. My mom and I had lots of issues never resolved since my teenage years. But rather than get therapy, I decided to spend more time with her, taking months off from work to listen to old records, watch Masterpiece Theatre videotapes and look at family pictures with her. I found old notes from her years as a decorator...
Physically he's doing great, but he's dying bit by bit mentally. Now 84, he thinks he's been fired from his job; sometimes he's so lonely he imagines Mom is still alive. Over and over, he makes lists of family and friends so he'll remember them; each time the list is shorter as he forgets more names. He thinks that he's been abandoned in a house of strangers, that he sleeps in a vault, that everyone in the world now wears diapers. I'd laugh if it weren't so awful. Even with two aides...