Wifeless Near Seattle
No, I'm not a widower, nor separated or divorced. My wife is out of town arranging care for her elderly parents - and during the busiest week of my entire career to boot. Well, moms and dads do get old, and crippling accidents aren't the kind of things you get to schedule. It's just a rotten confluence in this case, for everybody, but especially wifey.
We got a phone call on New Year's evening. My two women (the other is my daughter) and I were playing a variant of Monopoly, in which I was schooling my little girl (Hey, she's a teenager, so back off) on the practical aspects of nuts & bolts capitalism. Actually, we'd been getting phone calls all evening of one sort or another, a thoroughly annoying skein of interruptions that had my patience straining at the end of its admittedly short tether as it was. I'm not much for board (or card - oh, hell, non-computer) games anymore, but wanted to appease Mrs. HS's insistence that we do more things together "as a family, and playing a board game was one of her suggestions. Imagine my irony when I could barely keep her at the table.
Anyhow, this call was from our sister-in-law. She had called my in-laws and discovered that wifey's octogenarian dad, whose physical and mental enfeeblement is slowly but inexorably taking him down, had fallen - whether from a standing position or out of his chair or off the commode I never found out. It's not the first time he's done so, but aside from a broken arm on one occasion a few years ago, he's fortunately never gotten hurt.
This, however, was not the problem. The problem was that my, shall we say, "petite" octogenarian mother-in-law, who can't weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet, tried to pick him up and blew out two vertebrae in her back for her efforts. Why she didn't simply call 911 I'll never understand; maybe it was a rash "heat-of-the-moment" decision, or perhaps she'd done it before without incident. But, as Captain Kirk said in Generations, "Not this time."
How long she was on the floor alongside my father-in-law is another piece of information never clarified to my satisfaction. Regardless, my wife bolted for home the next day (only calling me at work in passing to tell me as she was careening out the door), which happened to coincide with avalanches in the Cascade mountain passes brought on by a temporary thaw (that has since gone away altogether). Blessedly, she didn't get taken by "white death" and made it over safely, where she's been ever since.
When Mrs. HS returns is anybody's guess. First it was going to be Thursday, then yesterday. Now it's Monday at the earliest, since her mom was hospitalized yesterday as she probably should have been several days earlier. And since her dad can't be left home by himself, she's got to arrange live-in (or respite) care for him as well as her mom once she's out of the hospital.
It's not the most practical of situations. Wifey has job and family responsibilities here (and I don't know how elasticly deferrable the former are) but can't come home until her folks are taken care of. And even though she works with the elderly for a living, it's got to be a completely different emotional plane when the old people in need are your own parents.
It's been something in the back of my mind for some time now, this business of her (and my) parents getting old. My own folks are in their early-to-mid seventies and my dad broke his hip a year and a half ago, something that, when it happened to my maternal grandmother, sent her plummeting into senility. Thankfully my dad made a full recovery instead, but what if he breaks the other one? And what happens if my mom, who is well-nigh indestructible, fiddles instead of faddles and hurts herself? If she hadn't been around to take care of my dad, my life might have gotten a lot more complicated.
Well, that's more than hypothetical for wifey, and the complications spider-web malignantly the longer she's away. I do have more to offer than just whining about it, though. Rather, an idea that is the template of how my family dealt with a very similar situation with my dad's mother twenty-four years ago.
Then, as now, my grandma fell down and couldn't get up again until somebody eventually found her. Since she had lived alone for years, and now quite obviously no longer could, and also lived clear back in Ohio, AND had nobody back there able to take care of her, AND would have been all by herself in what is euphemistically called "assisted living", we (which is to say, my father, who didn't remotely have the temperment for something like this but did what he had to do anyway) arranged for the sale of her home and moved her out here. It took her away from the place she had lived for nearly six decades, all the people she knew, to a place she'd visited once in her life, but she adjusted. She made new friends and was near her family. And she lived another fifteen years, to the ripe old age of 97.
If my wife's and my lives are not to be twisted beyond all reason by what is not, for her folks, going to be just a temporary setback, I believe that we need to do the same thing in this instance. Arrange for the disposition of their house, and move them over here close to us - heck, why not into the very facility at which Mrs. HS works? It wouldn't be nearly as distant a move as it was for my grandma, and they'd be a lot closer to their daughter and grandchildren [and me, even though they're life-long Democrats ;)]. And my wife wouldn't be perpetually pulled away from us by an on-going situation that simply will not lend itself to being managed from afar.
Knowing her as I do, I guarantee wifey will balk at the notion. Her folks probably would as well. But they took themselves out of the decision-making loop when Mom tried to play fireman, at least IMHO. They've become our responsibility, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let my family be dragged into opening a branch office three hundred miles away.
The logic is irrefutable. God willing, it will be, eventually, irresistable as well, for all our sakes.
We got a phone call on New Year's evening. My two women (the other is my daughter) and I were playing a variant of Monopoly, in which I was schooling my little girl (Hey, she's a teenager, so back off) on the practical aspects of nuts & bolts capitalism. Actually, we'd been getting phone calls all evening of one sort or another, a thoroughly annoying skein of interruptions that had my patience straining at the end of its admittedly short tether as it was. I'm not much for board (or card - oh, hell, non-computer) games anymore, but wanted to appease Mrs. HS's insistence that we do more things together "as a family, and playing a board game was one of her suggestions. Imagine my irony when I could barely keep her at the table.
Anyhow, this call was from our sister-in-law. She had called my in-laws and discovered that wifey's octogenarian dad, whose physical and mental enfeeblement is slowly but inexorably taking him down, had fallen - whether from a standing position or out of his chair or off the commode I never found out. It's not the first time he's done so, but aside from a broken arm on one occasion a few years ago, he's fortunately never gotten hurt.
This, however, was not the problem. The problem was that my, shall we say, "petite" octogenarian mother-in-law, who can't weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet, tried to pick him up and blew out two vertebrae in her back for her efforts. Why she didn't simply call 911 I'll never understand; maybe it was a rash "heat-of-the-moment" decision, or perhaps she'd done it before without incident. But, as Captain Kirk said in Generations, "Not this time."
How long she was on the floor alongside my father-in-law is another piece of information never clarified to my satisfaction. Regardless, my wife bolted for home the next day (only calling me at work in passing to tell me as she was careening out the door), which happened to coincide with avalanches in the Cascade mountain passes brought on by a temporary thaw (that has since gone away altogether). Blessedly, she didn't get taken by "white death" and made it over safely, where she's been ever since.
When Mrs. HS returns is anybody's guess. First it was going to be Thursday, then yesterday. Now it's Monday at the earliest, since her mom was hospitalized yesterday as she probably should have been several days earlier. And since her dad can't be left home by himself, she's got to arrange live-in (or respite) care for him as well as her mom once she's out of the hospital.
It's not the most practical of situations. Wifey has job and family responsibilities here (and I don't know how elasticly deferrable the former are) but can't come home until her folks are taken care of. And even though she works with the elderly for a living, it's got to be a completely different emotional plane when the old people in need are your own parents.
It's been something in the back of my mind for some time now, this business of her (and my) parents getting old. My own folks are in their early-to-mid seventies and my dad broke his hip a year and a half ago, something that, when it happened to my maternal grandmother, sent her plummeting into senility. Thankfully my dad made a full recovery instead, but what if he breaks the other one? And what happens if my mom, who is well-nigh indestructible, fiddles instead of faddles and hurts herself? If she hadn't been around to take care of my dad, my life might have gotten a lot more complicated.
Well, that's more than hypothetical for wifey, and the complications spider-web malignantly the longer she's away. I do have more to offer than just whining about it, though. Rather, an idea that is the template of how my family dealt with a very similar situation with my dad's mother twenty-four years ago.
Then, as now, my grandma fell down and couldn't get up again until somebody eventually found her. Since she had lived alone for years, and now quite obviously no longer could, and also lived clear back in Ohio, AND had nobody back there able to take care of her, AND would have been all by herself in what is euphemistically called "assisted living", we (which is to say, my father, who didn't remotely have the temperment for something like this but did what he had to do anyway) arranged for the sale of her home and moved her out here. It took her away from the place she had lived for nearly six decades, all the people she knew, to a place she'd visited once in her life, but she adjusted. She made new friends and was near her family. And she lived another fifteen years, to the ripe old age of 97.
If my wife's and my lives are not to be twisted beyond all reason by what is not, for her folks, going to be just a temporary setback, I believe that we need to do the same thing in this instance. Arrange for the disposition of their house, and move them over here close to us - heck, why not into the very facility at which Mrs. HS works? It wouldn't be nearly as distant a move as it was for my grandma, and they'd be a lot closer to their daughter and grandchildren [and me, even though they're life-long Democrats ;)]. And my wife wouldn't be perpetually pulled away from us by an on-going situation that simply will not lend itself to being managed from afar.
Knowing her as I do, I guarantee wifey will balk at the notion. Her folks probably would as well. But they took themselves out of the decision-making loop when Mom tried to play fireman, at least IMHO. They've become our responsibility, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let my family be dragged into opening a branch office three hundred miles away.
The logic is irrefutable. God willing, it will be, eventually, irresistable as well, for all our sakes.
posted by JASmius at 5:06 AM
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