The Admission

Giving, Giving Up, Giving In

Dad failed. And he knew it.

He tried to atone for it by sitting with Mom at the nursing home for six to eight hours a day. Unlike most of the other residents who had once a week or no visitors, he was “there” for her. He brought her KFC. He ate nursing home food with her. He sat beside her bed. He wheeled her to the courtyard to get some sunshine. If not for him, she would be sitting in front of the big screen TV in the recreation room in a soiled diaper where she and the rest of the compliant, demented, crippled residents would be parked by the over-worked staff. He complained to the staff, the administration, the cooks about the quality of care, her roommate who pilfered her toiletries, the schedules for changing her diapers, her meds and therapies, and the amount of salt in their recipes.

He could not accept that she remembered none of it. Her imagined gratitude to him was his self-constructed absolution and comfort.

She was released to the nursing home from the hospital. This was the second time she fell and fractured her back while he was taking care of her.

We had tried to talk him into moving in with us after Mom’s cancer surgery, chemo, and dementia ravaged her body and mind. He said he could take care of her. He was a medic in the Navy (but that was 65 years before). Her first fall was a “minor fracture” that put her in a walker. A few months later, she fell out of the walker in the bathroom and the second fall put her in a helicopter to the hospital, a wheelchair and in the nursing home.

The physical therapist said she could not be rehabilitated because of her dementia: she could not remember what they were teaching her about how to use a walker with a fractured back and a paralyzed leg. The risk of falling was too great. A wheelchair and help getting in and out of it was going to be permanent no matter how much Dad pushed and yelled and demanded from the therapist and Mom to try harder.

I watched him write a check for 7,000.00 for a month. I asked him, “At this rate, how long before you are bankrupt… You know you have to lose everything including your house to qualify for aid? Is this where you want to spend the rest of your life with Mom?” We went to the Knotty Pine, his favorite “hole in the wall diner” and we talked. The boundaries of “man to man” and “parent to child” shifted over the course of the meal and the refills of our coffee cups. Ground was not given up easily, but the assault of reality forced my Dad to retreat.

The reality of being a child is, you are ALWAYS a child, even at 60 years old. You have no authority, no wisdom, no judgment and no power. You are still an observer, a reactor, an offerer of opinions that, if offered by someone else might be considered wise. It is hard for a parent to be dependent on a child for either wisdom or physical existence. But, you are also someone who your parents, out of love, do not want to burden.

These are the hard intersections of family dynamics: Humility, humiliation, trust and suspicion, strength and weakness, the reversal of roles and the shifting of dependence and power, the giving up and giving in to control, authority over “stuff”, and the constriction of freedom and independence. In short, the parent must consent to becoming the child, and the child must have the wisdom and emotional stability to become a parent to someone they have issues with… and who does not have issues with parents (and parents with their children)?

He said, “I don’t want to put you through that again with us. It’s too much.”

I told him, “We decided to take care of Peggy’s Dad. Let US make that decision for you and Mom. We’ve made it, and we’ve made it clear to you for years.”

It was clear, but he balked… until he failed, and now it was his only option.

“You’re right”, he said.

I don’t know that I ever heard my Dad say that to me.