Aging parents

I have no photos to post.   I've been visiting my parents for the several days and I am realizing how difficult it is to watch my parents get old.   I am the youngest child in my family, and to my parents I am forever a child.   There is that to contend with, but that is nothing so unusual.  My parents have been married for over 50 years, but they bicker endlessly -something which I find exhausting to be near and one of the primary reasons that in my early 20's when I graduated from school, I knew I couldn't live at home again.    Even that, is something I have learned to cope with for short stints by retreating to a bedroom.   

Watching aging is different.   I have watched other family members cope with aging parents and wondered why they fought it so hard.   My sister-in-law had a mother with dementia and she was forever trying to correct her memory.   I always wondered why she bothered.   Her mother was perfectly happy with her version of the truth and it didn't really harm anyone, so why try to correct her?   And here I am fighting the same aging with my parents who are in their early 80's, living quite independently, and I hope will continue to do so for some time.    The way aging creeps up on someone close to us can be so difficult -we are blind to it, we deny it, we fight it, and even when it is blatantly obvious to the rest of the world we pursue the battle of fighting change.   

My mother is losing her short-term memory and continually changes the subject of a conversation to some point that seems entirely irrelevant or tangent to the flow of the conversation.  Worse, she tries to hold the floor with the irrelevant story telling until someone interrupts her and just redirects back to the conversation -which might be five or ten minutes later when she completes her story.    Generally the stories are about her family or childhood and although they begin marginally related to a topic, they take on their own life and until my mother forgets herself what point she is trying to make and sometimes she forgets the story she is telling and just moves into another.   If I ask her what her story has to do with the topic she inevitably answers, "I don't know, it just made me think of the time when...."   I find I can be patient with this for a day or two, and then I just lose it and say, "Mom, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about."   I get short with her and my impatience grows.   I notice she either doesn't listen, doesn't remember, or some combination of both to the things other people say.   I don't do it -but I really want to shake her and tell her to snap out of her spaciness.

With my father, it is a combination of anger, depression, cynicism, and restlessness that is difficult to be around.   He is stressed out to watch his life savings shrink with the economy.  He is worried about the state of our country.   He watches too much economic analysis on tv.   He worries about the state of a world he cannot change or impact, and I suspect feels powerless and irrelevant.   He ruminates over decisions that in the past would have been easily made.  He gets angry and is easily agitated when things don't go his way.   He is angry if he has to wait too long in a line.   He even throws tantrums.   He has a very difficult time adjusting to changes.  On this visit, I've been spending time skiing with him, and although he is physically slower than he once was, his mood is elevated and his perspective of life is more positive overall.   The less he is confronted with serious decision making and the more time he spends outdoors and physically active, the more he is the father I know.   I have told him this.   I've told him it is nice to be around him when he's not acting like a crazy person.   He admits he gets depressed watching what is happening to the world.   Last night we watched, "No Country For Old Men."  When I first saw it some time ago, I wasn't sure about the ending... all the good people are killed and the bad guys get away... and the movie just sort of ends with the retired sheriff trying to decide what to do with his day and talking about his dream of his father.    This time, after my time with my father, I saw a world where the old rules don't apply, where life doesn't make sense, where things don't work out the way they should.... where a man feels to old to do the job he once had... at the point in life when we lose the fight inside of us.   This is where my father is, so I just encourage him to take in the years he has left for the beauty he can find, not the ugliness he cannot change. 

Mostly I need to take my own advice.   I need to approach my parents and their aging with less desire to change it, and more appreciation of what is and what I have.