Squished: Like a penny on a train track

After the Substack People read THIS one, they surely will add a content category for "aging" or "retirement" or "eldercare."

Since my dad passed away, a few people have asked whether I’m less Squished now that my brother and I (and our very supportive spouses) aren’t taking care of him.

Ah, no.

Definitely not less Squished. I’d say the squishedness has evolved, however, given the pressures at this strange time. Let’s start with Mom.

Mom

After my father died, my brother and I were forced to confront something that our very supportive spouses had already anticipated:

Now we’d have to deal with our mom.

That ‘we’ would be my brother and me. My husband and my sister-in-law want nothing to do with her, owing to past harms. And that’s being nice.

But my mother is getting old. This summer she had a mild heart attack that was misdiagnosed as a urinary tract infection. Since UTIs are so often misdiagnosed themselves, now they over-diagnose them, and miss little things like heart attacks.

My brother and I spent three or four weeks during the hottest corridor of the summer dealing with Mom, doctors and MRIs, first in one hospital, then another — and then in and out of two different rehabs (a bizarre story for another day) — while my mother behaved alternately like a dry drunk (which she is); a princess (“The food here is terrible”); and a prisoner in “Escape from Alcatraz.” 

At one point, during a particularly memorable attempt to flee from rehab #2, she sat in her wheelchair in the lobby for hours, taking any chance she got to bolt through the sliding glass doors. 

When we finally got there, the attendant at the lobby desk just shook her head. “I’m keeping an eye on her. She can’t get far. But she’s quick!”

Psychodrama

For the first time during those hot, stressful weeks I realized that my brother — who was always stoic, yet cheerful, while Dad was living with him — was as baffled and tormented by our mother as I am. In fact, when we compared notes about how Mom wrings me out versus how she push-pulls him, we were appalled to realize that she deploys different tactics with each of us. 

But honestly. Why were we even surprised? Our mother has nothing if not a well-stocked arsenal of strategies for knocking you sideways — and then (my therapist tells me this is my traumatized inner child) reeling you back in again.

Or, as I’ve come to think of it, my mother is actually sort of OK — e.g., loving, caring, maternal — about 14% to 15% of the time. You just never know when, or for how long. Case in point, she just sent my son a birthday card, with a check, for his 18th birthday. Signed it: “Love always, G.” Made me want to get in the car, drive to her falling-apart apartment, and …

Anyway, you can see why my strategy for decades was: Keep trying. She’s in there. 

But who? The mom I once knew, who cared, who cooked, who worked tirelessly to hold our family together? She did all that. And more. And worse.

She’ll be 85 in the spring, if she lives that long. She isn’t mentally well, and I don’t know what demons lurk therein. She probably doesn’t either. My heart aches for her. But it also beats for me, for my brother and our very supportive spouses, and the millions of people like us caught between competing demands. Like duty and sanity.

Hopscotch

In early September, my husband and I spent a week in a cabin by a lake with a few folks we love, most of them around our age. It was remote, peaceful, woodsy. Everything you imagine when you google “cabin on a lake.”

This is just a stock photo. Nice though. Photo by Juho Luomala on Unsplash

But I will tell you: On any given day, not even two hours would pass without a question, a discussion, a debate, or an urgent call — about an older parent.

For a whole week.

Sure, there was swimming and hiking and cooking and all the things you do. But underneath all the doings was the thrum of eight middle-aged people trying to hopscotch ahead of six frail and aging parents, who technically weren’t even there, except in all the ways they were.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines eldercare as “individuals who provide unpaid care to someone age 65 or older who needs help because of a condition related to aging.” That phrase cracks me up: a condition related to aging. Well, then: Since there are about 37.1 million eldercare-givers, we all need help because of conditions related to aging. 

Words

Why isn’t eldercare a campaign issue? Why isn’t everyone talking about it in the same breath as AI? As climate change? Some people are, of course. There are economists and policymakers and researchers and advocates on the frontlines who are working tirelessly to figure out solutions. Meanwhile, the phrase “silver tsunami” — which has turned into a rug people sweep shit under — needs a takedown.

• Our rapidly aging population is not a natural disaster.

• Older adults are not a type of extreme weather event.

• The elderly among us are not going to collectively, like a giant wave, rise up, wreak havoc, and then vanish.

Also: silver. I know what it refers to. Yet there’s an insinuation that there’s a silver lining here somewhere. 

One of my best friends sent me an article today that left my stomach in knots. In it, an ER doctor describes her desperate attempts to help her mother get the medication and care she needed, but hitting wall after brick wall in the medical and social service systems. (All this in Canada!) At the end of the piece, I was comforted when the author wrote:

“I’m not here to provide answers but to share one story of how I was powerless to prevent my own mother from becoming homeless due to her mental illness, despite my intimate knowledge of the system.”

I feel powerless about my mom. I feel powerless for many of the people I love, who have reasonable amounts of money and college educations, and yet struggle to manage their own lives along with the needs of an 80- or 90-year-old.

Invention 

I’m going to try something. I’m going to say, in every conversation about older people, This is hard. 

1. “This is hard” is short and easy to pronounce.

2. It skirts blame and offers compassion, while acknowledging reality. 

3. It invites others to share their own version (since there are at least 37.1 million versions of why it’s hard).

4. You can dress it up after a glass of wine: “This is FUCKING HARD.” And then cry.

I’m going to bounce this one up and down in a few conversations, and see if I can turn into a springboard. Maybe I’ll say, “Goddammit, this is hard.” And a friend will say, “Yeah, let’s do something about it.”