Having “The Talk” with an Elderly Parent

To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, it’s been a challenging week in my hometown in rural Minnesota. The extensive support network of a personal care attendant, visiting home nurse, meals on wheels and a family member acting as a 24-hour caregiver, has proven insufficient to continue to allow my 89-year-old mother to safely remain in her home. The time has come (actually the time has probably long passed) to consider other options for her care.

As is usually the case, the bulk of the responsibility for caring for elderly parents often falls to the children who live nearest to them. The siblings who live in my hometown have received the middle-of-the-night phone calls and missed work to spend hours in the emergency room at the hospital. They have visited assisted living centers and nursing homes trying to identify the option that would address our mother’s medical and social needs. Those of us who live in the Twin Cities offer advice and encouragement in phone calls and e-mails and an occasional visit to relieve the constant caregivers; but it’s not the same stress as dealing with the situation day in and day out. It reaches a point where something needs to be done. For my family, including my mother, we reached that point last week.

Following a particularly harrowing week with several bed-bound days, my siblings and I, along with my niece who cares for our mother, mobilized to call insurance companies and to meet with social workers to determine the options that were available for the matriarch of our family. As complicated as some of these meetings and conversations were, they all paled in comparison to having to sit down with our mother and grandmother and tell her it was probably time for her to go to a nursing home. It’s a conversation that all of us had been avoiding and dreading. It seems it may have been a conversation that my mother was anticipating.

My sisters and niece had earlier set the stage for “the talk” having shared with my mother their concerns about her continuing to live at home. That, combined with increasing health concerns, made the timing right to ask our mother what she wanted to do. When she turned the question on us and asked what it was that we thought she should do, we responded by saying that we thought it was time for her to go to a facility that could provide more care than she could get at home. “Then that’s what we should do” was her immediate response. That decided, the conversation quickly turned to logistics: what it is she should bring with her; what would happen to her house; when there might be an opening at the nursing home; and where she would spend Christmas.

Since that discussion, as we wait for a room to become available, I’m certain that my mom has had some sleepless nights. Maybe, when her family isn’t around, she has walked through her home – filled with 40 years of memories – and shed a tear or two, or possibly many more. She may have wanted to scream in frustration, “Why is this happening to me?” But if she has experienced any of those emotions, she hasn’t let them show.

Our mother has handled the decision to go to a nursing home with great composure. Never wanting to be a burden to any of her children or grandchildren, she has treated all of us with gentleness and love; sensing perhaps, that this decision isn’t easy for us either. Just when you think that a parent can’t teach you any more lessons, they surprise you with one more. They show you how to age with tremendous dignity.