- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
This is the third part of a series you can find here.
So, where was I? Oh, yeah. I was in the loony bin. Now I remember. I was telling you about the time Maw and Paw first broached the idea of us all moving in together.
“We’re going to accelerate our end-of-life plan,” I remember Maw telling me. I have to admit, I wasn’t wild about the idea even then, back when they both still could walk, drive and open pickle jars for themselves. And I couldn’t believe that Gary was in favor of the idea. As you can probably imagine by now, Gary had solid reasons for his support: he figured that at least this way I wouldn’t have to travel in order to take care of them; he considered the taking care part sort of an inevitable eventuality. And of course he was right. What a nightmare it would have been to have to add incessant air travel to my list of caregiving tasks. Even having Maw four minutes away at the Home last winter was a huge hassle.
At least half the people at that last Family Caregiver Month event were involved in long-distance care. From what I could gather, it involves a lot of frantic phone calls and beating your head against a wall.
For some reason, that was a curiously affecting meeting, for me, unpleasant though it was. Normally, I have a pretty low tolerance for the usual mawkish support group chow-chow, and I always feel like an oddity at those kinds of things. I guess it’s because I tend to be considerably younger than the other caregivers, I still have children at home, and oh yeah… because I am an unconscionable bitch. I am afraid to speak, lest I reveal my less-than-virtuous attitude. Anyway, I don’t think most support groups would be interested in hearing how I duck Maw’s phone calls or help Paw cheat on his memory test.
I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that I am not the only beauty school dropout punching the eldercare timeclock. They’re all over the t.v., seems like, women doing hard time after the cops find Grandma dead on the bathroom floor, her ribs in splinters and shoeprints on her forehead. It’s entirely possible that I have more in common with these caregivers than I do the nice ladies facilitating the support group who suggest I take time for me. The ones on t.v., I do believe, are truly my people.
