Welcoming my 100-year-old mother-in-law into our home was natural after observing what my father and mother had done for my grandmother for two years in the early 1980s, and observing what my sister and brother-in-law did for my mother for five years in the early 2000s.
Most people would prefer to die in a home-like setting surrounded by family, rather than in an institution. If my wife and I can make that possible for her mother, it seems like a noble mission and purpose. We recognize it may not be possible, too difficult and overwhelming. Going to an institution that offers assisted living and skilled nursing is thankfully still an option for my mother-in-law.
Fortunately, we have a lot of emotional support from Lucia’s siblings in the form of daily calls. There’s also physically-present assistance from Aegis Home Care and from our neighborhood’s volunteer group, Fearrington Cares, part of the Village to Village Movement, helping people age in place.
My mother in the 1980s wrote up her experiences of caring for my grandmother, titling it “When Your Mother Becomes Your Child.” Ironically, in her last days at age 86, my mother found comfort in words she herself had written nearly 25 years earlier. She asked her granddaughter Eve to read that chapter of her book because “that’s where we are again.”
There is a whole sub-genre of self-help books and articles on parents and spouses devolving into children as they age. My mother in her era seemed to view it as a natural evolution that had to be accepted. But she was a born nurturer and caregiver herself and felt obligated to care for her loved ones at home, no matter the toll it took on her. She practiced “love without boundaries,” which was popular in her day. Psychotherapists tend to warn against it today.
Psychologists also warn against talking down to or patronizing elderly people by treating them like children. My mother-in-law takes offense at potential caregivers who presume at 100 she’s, in her words, “a blithering idiot…the town ninny.” She seeks to quickly assure them she’s “somebody…I haven’t lost my mind. I’m an educated person…with a history and a background.” Of course, there’s a thin line. Too much talk of grandness can sound pretentious and egocentric.
My mother wrote, in caring for her mother: “I was grateful for the opportunity to make the last years of a parent I adored and admired relatively pleasant and comfortable, by providing a home for her in my home.”
Right: My grandmother Lessie with her great-granddaughter Eve in the late 1970s at my parents’ house (Photo by Kathy Buie Vance). Left: My grandson Theo with great-grandmother Carol. There are “only” 92 years between them.
I draw strength from what may be ahead by reading what my mother wrote about Lessie’s deteriorating condition during the last two years of her life and how the family coped:
It was “
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