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Eric Anthony Johnson/Getty ImagesLike a lot of dutiful adult sons and daughters, my friend Margaret braved the airport this week. She and her family are spending Christmas with her elderly parents in South Carolina.
She’s vowing that this five-day visit will be different from her last trip south, in October. She wants to take her mother, whose memory is slipping noticeably but who still enjoys outings, to a movie. Maybe they’ll do a little clothes shopping. She and her daughters will bake gingerbread cookies, Russian tea cakes and some airy meringue kisses; her mother might be able to help.
She’ll take her parents out to dinner one night, and she’ll drive them to church. They stopped going a while ago because her father can no longer hear.
“We just need to enjoy this time together,” Margaret told me.
Long-distance caregivers, or would-be caregivers, so often load up their brief visits with chores that need attending to. Of course they do.
A while back, Margaret’s father took a fall on the stairs, so when she was last there she installed additional hand rails, over his protests. She fixed the unreliable amplification feature on their phone, because communicating was becoming difficult; her father couldn’t hear Margaret when she called, and her mother promptly forgot what she was saying before she could pass it along.
Most significantly, Margaret persuaded her parents that they could use a paid helper rather than relying so much on a good friend for favors and assistance. Even though they agreed only to let the aide come for a few hours every other week, she thought she’d made an important start. “It was excruciating,” she said about the ceaseless negotiations. But she flew home feeling relieved.
Then her father dismissed the aide after a single visit. The phone amplifier failed again. And that friend called Margaret last week to say that on her last visit, her parents’ refrigerator was nearly empty.
So everything that was wrong on Margaret’s last trip south, and on her brother’s last trip, is still wrong. Yet she’s vowed not to spend this holiday being Ms. Fixit.
Her wrangles with her father, who opposes all forms of help (but doesn’t seem to recognize that he’s imposing on a friend), resists spending money on anything (even other people’s money) and insists he can drive perfectly well (wrong), grew very tense last time, she realized afterward. When she called to say she and her family would be there for Christmas, and her mother excitedly repeated the news, Margaret could hear her father groaning, “Oh boy.”
“I think we may actually have done some damage to our relationship,” she told me. This round, “I need to remedy that. I don’t want it to be World War III every time I go down there.”
To be honest, Margaret won’t renounce all attempts at improvement. The refrigerator won’t be bare when she leaves, and she intends to discover whether the local supermarket makes deliveries. She’s bought a new phone and intends to adapt it for TTY service for the hearing-impaired. Being a long-distance caregiver is hard enough; without being able to call and talk, it’s nearly impossible.
But her primary purpose is to appreciate the season with her parents, to give them simple pleasures and to give herself a break. She recognizes their problems, and her own limitations, but she wants to set all that aside for a few days.? Simply to be together — that also matters.
She’s bringing some of the best possible presents for people who already have too much stuff: photos in an album, grandchildren, herself.? And a commitment, for now, to peace and good will.
Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”
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