Tuesday, October 22, 2024

I'm glad your Dad seems to be improving. Thank goodness for DB and wife. I hope a decision on how to keep they safe can be made so they can move back to their home though. Maybe start having someone come in to help while they are still there and then continuing that might work?

DD, that's excellent news that your dad is improving without surgery or some other invasive medical work that requires a long recovery. You're also fortunate that your brother and sister-in-law are able to care for your folks at this time. As I've said several times, the 12 years I cared for my mom were the most stressful of my life.

Yesterday I had lunch with my banker who's currently caring for her aging father, stepmother, mother, father-in-law and mother-in-law. That's FIVE old folks she's caring for and arranging care for! They're either in the hospital, a nursing home, intensive post-surgical physical therapy, wheelchair-bound, or at home with caregivers. They suffer from a variety of old-age ailments like dementia, broken hips, knee surgery recovery, debilitating arthritis. And most of them sound like they're stubborn as mules.

My DF and I are working very hard right now to create a "forever home" (and of course we know we can't guarantee we'll be there forever) to minimize the potential dangers to our well-being like going up and down stairs. It's odd to me that so many of us can't imagine the need to prepare ourselves for being truly elderly and what that era will mean to our lives and our families.

It seems that we humans just aren't very well engineered to confront this last phase of life. But then most of us weren't sufficiently prepared for puberty, marriage, adulting, mid-life crises, menopause, or retirement either. Perhaps this whole thing called life needs to be redesigned. I just wish we could get a little wiser about a lot of things a little earlier.