Raising parents is not kid stuff. Here I am just getting accustomed to getting older myself when I am confronted with parents I can’t do anything with. In all fairness I must say that my parents were blindsided by aging as well. They were bright, articulate, and socially active one minute and the next thing you know we noticed that perhaps they were not making the best decisions.

Daddy’s second mild stroke seemed to be the catalyst for their rapid decent into old age. The first I heard of “the stroke” was when my parents returned from a family reunion escorted by my mother’s brothers. She refers to them as “the boys”. Momma is now approaching 88 so I guess her younger brothers who are well into their 70’s seem like boys. At any rate, I get a telephone call from my mother when she returns from the reunion. The first thing she says is, “Well, I had a terrible time at the reunion. You father had a stroke.” That should have been a red flag for me but I have grown accustomed to things being all about momma so I missed it. She proceeds to tell me that daddy’s speech became garbled… STROKE,,,,and he could not walk….STROKE. The “boys” load momma and daddy in the boat and take them back to their brother’s house. Momma said that she had a terrible time with daddy that night; no they did not go to the hospital because the person who had the stroke was making the medical decisions. The “boys” were planning on visiting my parents anyway so one of them drove my parent’s car and the other one followed. So they get home, daddy cannot stand or walk without assistance, and they go to the Cracker Barrel to eat because momma has not cooked a meal since she had the total kitchen renovation. Here these people who have led sensible lives are dragging daddy into the Cracker Barrel to eat and they think it is normal behavior.

I alerted my brothers, who did not know anything about this, to discuss getting daddy to the doctor. My brother made an appointment with the doctor and guess what; momma didn’t go with him, she sent “the boys”. Daddy saw the doctor and did not mention he had a vascular event over the weekend. The doctor had not seen him for two years since the first stroke so he assumed the symptoms were not new. We are getting smarter at this point and realized that someone had to go with them or call ahead to give the real story.

Becoming the parent of your parents is the most difficult thing you will ever attempt. My parents think that they are fine. When you ask if they have taken their medicine they smile and say yes. It doesn’t matter if you put it in a cute little dose box because you will never see that apparatus again. They either take too much or don’t take it at all. One of the first medicine problems we had was getting the prescription out of the store without loosing it. My brother thought he solved that problem with mail order prescriptions that he keeps and gives out a month’s supply. When the prescription last more than a month you know they are not taking it. Sometimes it doesn’t last a month because they take it too often. We tried to get momma involved in monitoring the medication. This is how she did it. Did you take your medicine? Yes? Okay. Never put one old person in charge or another old person.

My parents are fortunate enough have earned a good income and to live in their own home. It is the home the last three children grew up in. It is too large for them to maintain, the yard is high maintenance with a pond and numerous shrubs and plants that require attention, and now it is too late for them to make a change. They should have sold their house while they were still able to adapt to new surroundings. The problem was parting with their things. Lord knows they have lots of things. We became acutely aware of the enormous amount of things when daddy fell coming out of the garage. It was family cleaning day again. We went into the garage cleaning project with one goal, safety. We came armed with a truck, a trailer, and those wonderful heavy duty paper yard waste bags that sit flat while you fill them. We were confronted with stacks of newspapers and magazines bound neatly together waiting for the school paper drive that they have not had in Lord knows how long. That was the first thing we loaded in the trailer. Daddy mentioned that the school made money on the recycling. I told him that I would write them a check but we were headed for the recycling bins at the dump. Daddy began to stand vigil beside the trailer. We would put something in, and he would take it out. What we needed was someone to distract daddy. We threw away parts of weed eaters, empty boxes, and broken tools. He was furious about us ditching the 1964 World Book Encyclopedias. I asked him when was the last time we went in the garage, dug through boxes to come up with some 44 year old information. He thought someone could use them. He didn’t realize that children now accessed information via the internet. Later I realized that he probably had made payments on those books. Here he was a 33 rpm record in an ipod world. Here we were, three grown children making trip after trip to the dump with items that should have been discarded rather than stored in the garage. Momma was happy for us to get rid of daddy’s junk. Daddy was not. At the end of the day we were dirty, tired, and sad to see how our parents have aged.