Opaque Lucidity

Age

PAGES: 6 (I'm working on it, really)

My mother fell and and shattered some of the bones in her shoulder this morning. She's 67 and my first thought was this it might have been some sort of age-related accident. In reality, she tripped on a foot stool in the dark when she got up (at 4AM) to say the rosary, something that she has done since before I was born. To quote her, "Any damn fool could've tripped over something in the dark."

She's right, of course. I have tripped over stuff in the middle of the day, and I'm supposed to be spry and well-balanced. But the implication of a broken bone in a senior citizen has really made me realize that my parents are slowly becoming fragile, something I do not take lightly. I knew the days of elderly parents would come (and it's really not here, yet), but not the days of fragility. Broken hips, arthritis and the rest are things that happen to other old people, not my parents.

Since I see mom and dad often, their age has seemed to come on them slowly. But I know that down the road somewhere, hard decisions are going to have to be made about living arrangements and all the rest. It may be 10 years from now, but it's coming like a freight train and there's nothing I can do about it. I dread this, for I have seen friends make these decisions and it's never easy. Essentially, either your parents tell you or (worse) you tell your parents that they can't stay in their house anymore because they can't take care of it or themselves. I doesn't matter that it's the house you and your siblings grew up in or that it's the house they've put 40 years of work into to make it just the wanted it.

In my opinion, it's a pretty shitty deal.

Posted by Matthew at November 17, 2003 11:21 PM