Aging Parents

I talked to my mother on the phone on Sunday, something that I had not done in about six weeks. I had received a letter from her maybe three or four weeks ago, and just couldn’t find the time to respond to it. If you have been a faithful reader of this blog, you are aware that my relationship with my mother is OK, but is not exactly warm and fuzzy, and has really never been that easy – when I was growing up, my relationship with her was based more on fear than on love. I guess she is just a rather difficult person with whom to get along. I am in good terms with her though, but that’s mostly because I watch myself when I talk to her and never say anything that might displease her. I know better.

Anyway, I realized, talking to her two days ago, that she is really aging, at an exponential rate. I asked her how she was doing, and said that she had a backache. Now, this is serious for her because, a few years ago, she had a fairly serious operation to remove arthritic spurs along her spine. If she had not had this surgery, she would have soon been unable to walk. She recovered quite well, but it may be that those things are growing back and, this time, surgery would probably be out of the question. She also complained about not sleeping well.

I actually do not care for my mother’s tendency to dwell over health matters. I still believe that she turned me into the mildly hypochondriac individual that I am today by constantly harping me about my health when I was a child and in my teens (although, as noted below, my father’s heredity looms large here too – but, with him, I am convinced that my mother was in a codependent relationship in which she was the enabler.) Even in our telephone conversation on Sunday, she made a point of asking me if I was in good health – I know that she has always been totally obsessed about cancer, and I always interpret that question to me as really meaning “so, the big C hasn’t hit you yet?” As a result, I have never mentioned a word to her about minor health issues that I have experienced over the past two years or so.

Anyway, I had had that same thought about her aging when I got her letter a few weeks ago. For one, it was shorter than normal, and in it, she apologized about having taken so long to answer a letter that I had sent her a good two months earlier. Now, in the old days, she would have answered any of my letters within a day or two of having received them. She made some lame excuse about “having been busy,” but I wonder if she had not been just too tired to take pen and paper and write.

This is a bit worrisome because, a little over two years ago, she and her husband (who is 90 years old, they got married on the day she turned 81, which was October 1, 2002) moved from the ritzy retirement community where they lived to an apartment, which means that they now have to be autonomous – nobody shops for them, cooks for them, etc. And, as they get older, those simple tasks that we take for granted become more and more daunting to perform.

Of course, her mind is still sharp as a razor blade (and so is her tongue) -- she went on again about the fact that, beside her husband, she has “no one,” and that she wished I lived closer to her. Of course, I can only imagine that, would I be living near her, we might not even be in speaking terms, because she has a way of getting into protracted fights with those who are close to her. Hence, the resulting loneliness; it’s getting to the point that all her friends or relatives who are not dead are no longer her friends or, in the case of relatives, she is no longer on speaking terms with them.

This experience of seeing a parent get “really” old is new to me, because I never got to see my father – or any of my relatives, for that matter – age before my eyes. My father died of Hodgkins disease in early 1993, wiped out in literally just a bit over six months’ time. He was only a few days short of turning 73 when he died and, even though he was a chronic hypochondriac, he was still in pretty good shape before he got really sick. OK, back in the early 1990’s, I was a little taken aback at how little was left of the sharp, quick witted, and intellectually robust man my uncle Jean had been when I saw him for the last time, which was about six months to a year before he passed away – but he was over 80 when he died.

I know that one’s parents are bound to age and that, in the natural order of things, they do go before their children do. But it’s a pretty sad predicament to witness the slow decay of a human being you used to know as a force of nature, even if that force was not always used in a way that you would deem the most pleasant for you, or for others for whom you care.