Rosemary for Remembrance

Her vitals are good, she's cheerful (I call this being Midwestern, but w/ev) and she isn't so far on any pain medication.

Next up, rehab. My brother will be there tomorrow.

It has become clear that my parents stayed in the lowest step of a retirement community far, far longer than they should have. My mother concealed my father's dementia. My parents refused all offers to move to the next step -- a completely independent apartment -- long after they were incapable of caring for themselves in a duplex. My widowed mother continued to refuse all offers until she wound up in the dementia ward with hallucinations -- which have been cured when her medications, hydration, and food intake were supervised. She continues to insist, in the dementia ward, that she is capable of moving back to their house, and refuses to move to an assisted apartment.

My husband, bless his heart and I mean this absolutely seriously, thinks there Ought To Be A Solution. It ought to be possible to move people where they need to go. We need to make plans so we won't do this to our children.

And the thing is, it doesn't work that way. Power of attorney, and the nursing home's ability to force change, are a binary. Is the person capable of making legally binding decisions yes/no? And if they're capable of making legally binding decisions, no matter how self-sabotaging or how stupid, you can't protect them. The nursing home can't move them until they are demonstrated to be incapable. The children can't move them until they are demonstrated to be incapable. And we couldn't take away the car keys until either the Indiana BMV did it, or until my mother became so legally incompetent that we had the right. The car keys are hidden now; my mother's best friend has my mother's driver's license. And that's only possible because we have my mother's POA and her lawyer agrees that she's demented. The ultimate irony here is that my parents moved to the multistep retirement community to save my brother and me the agonies they went with their parents.

My husband lucked out, after a fashion: his parents were willing to move from step to step as it became necessary. Soon after they moved to the independent apartment, his father, rest his educated soul, developed Parkinson's. A couple of years after her husband died, my mother-in-law, who had always disliked driving, gave up her driver's license and her car. To be fair, she is fiercely annoyed by the next next step, in which nurses aides show up regularly to check her insulin and make sure she's safe.

I hope, as an aging mother, to behave more like my in-laws than like my parents. I hope -- very much hope -- that I am neither so secretive nor so fiercely independent as my parents. But, you know, I inherit my mom's (and my dad's) bossiness, and who knows how aging further will treat me.

There isn't a settled solution to dementia. Up until the point where it demonstrably happens, you can't override a competent parent's decision. And after it demonstrably happens, you may have a fight on your hands.

I would say "hope I die before I get old", but I'm sixty. Love you, children. Hope I'm more reasonable when aging further than my parents were.

I found the damn key. I'd left it on the seat of my mom's car, when I was hastily moving both it and my rental out of the way of the movers. BIG SIGH OF RELIEF.

My mother has just, this morning, fired her current GP for disagreeing with her. That makes two. I predict she'll go through all the GPs in Indiana until she finds some quack who will assure her that everything is fine and all she needs is naturopathy.

We'll see what the lawyer says. I'm starting to believe that we will have to formally apply for legal guardianship. It takes work and money and possibly another trip to Indiana, but at least it will settle the legal and financial side once and for all. Our/Mom's lawyer had advised us in February that it was probably overkill. Turns out it wasn't.

When my parents downsized the home they'd lived in since 1973, they moved the most treasured books and furniture and objects to the semi-detached house I'm sitting in now. Everywhere I look, I see things that remind me of my childhood. The dementia ward encourages you to bring your own furniture, so now I'm looking around to try to decide what would make Mom feel most at home and what pictures or ornaments she would particularly find comforting. It's a small room. Mom is still extremely angry and doesn't want anything moved because that would imply she's staying there and she isn't. I did bring up some family photographs, which she's enjoying, and will bring another batch later.

This sorting is doubly hard, because I'm asking both what are the essential objects to Mom and which are the essential objects to me. The tall silver Japanese vase, the Swedish sewing table (mineminemine), Dad's collection of Captain Midnight decoder badges, the ruby glass vase. All of them say Mom and Dad and my childhood; they're saturated with it. Leaving aside arguments with my brother -- which I actually don't expect, we've talked about it -- I can't keep everything that reminds me of my home. My parents lived a much more elegant life than I do. The ruby glass vase isn't us; it's Mom and Dad and Great-Aunt Mary, but it's not our sort of thing. The enormous panels of Arts-and-Crafts-style stained glass won't fit our Californian ranch windows, which are horizontal, not vertical. The books we flat-out don't have room for. We don't have much/any knickknack space. Our existing space is crammed with books and furniture and Stuff.

There will be helpers. I don't know what to do with my mom's double digits of houseplants, or the Swedish modern flat-woven rug from the 1970s (Ryas are collectable, flat-woven is not), or two out of the three chests of family silver. (A childless aunt, my grandmother, my mother.) There are so many things that are treasured, but won't be anybody else's treasures.

And of course I feel terrible thinking these thoughts; how selfish! But one of the things I've got to do while I'm here is start cleaning out the house.