If you are caring
for an elderly parent, the best advice I can give is to find a
friend who is in similar circumstances. Sharing information, swapping
the tales of funny moments (or even the occasional horror story)
can make all the difference between drowning in a sea of self-pity,
or finding the strength to continue your efforts to see your parent
lovingly through to the end. A sense of humor, even a macabre
one, is definitely a sanity-saver. In that spirit, here's a funny
story:
About three weeks
ago, my mother took a shirt out of her overcrowded wardrobe, shook
it out and sniffed: "Well, I guess it's been ironed, but not well
ironed." I resisted reminding her that I'm the one who presses
her shirts, or pointing out that it wasn't the ironing that was
at fault, but the crammed closet. I told myself firmly to forget
it; it wasn't worth griping about. The next day, however, the
shirt showed up in her hamper, clean but balled up. An inner demon
took hold of me. I was darned if I was going to iron the fool
thing again. So I decided to send the shirt to the laundry the
next time I took in my dry cleaning.
The following week
was her birthday. A few days earlier, when I was buying myself
a new watch battery, I spied a something called a "talking clock."
Aha, I thought, that's just the thing, as Mother can no longer
tell time on an analog clock and cannot read the numbers on the
digital clock. Some years back, a stroke affected the optic nerve,
and took away a quarter of her right visual field (both eyes).
This plays hob with her depth perception, among other things,
but what makes the digital numbers impossible to read is their
gridded, squared-off shape. There are no curves to give clues
between 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 or 9.
Mother has also lost
the meaning of am/pm, and continually asks me whether I mean am
or pm when I tell her I'll be there between 2 and 3. The "talking
clock" has a large bar on the top, and pressing it brings a chime
followed by a female voice that says, for instance, "5 pm." It
seemed like the perfect present for my mother's birthday.
The clock has other
functions controlled by tiny buttons on the front, such as alarm,
chime selection, and a function that makes it speak on the hour
every hour from 5 am until 12 noon, but those buttons and names
were so small I figured she wouldn't be able to read them - and
any way, I suggested that she not touch them, but use only the
bar on top.
I hadn't really considered
the problem of her short-term memory loss. Of course she could
not remember about the bar, nor find it if she did remember, and
of course she proceeded to turn on all the possible functions.
Every day for a week, I came in to find the clock stuffed in a
drawer, wrapped in a sweater, hidden in the hamper, etc., and
my mother in a state, saying things like: "I can't stop the damned
thing from talking" (she had set the automatic on-the-hour, 5am-noon
button) or "It doesn't keep good time"(she had hit the buttons
that reset the time) or "It makes funny noises" (she had changed
the chime).
We did try, she and
I. I taped over the other buttons, one by one. We practiced and
practiced hitting the top bar, several times each day when I arrived
and several more times before I left. But after a solid week,
she just couldn't retain the information. At last, I took the
clock back, with her blessing ('"A good idea, darling, but They
just haven't worked the bugs out yet").
We were at the mall,
returning the clock, when it occurred to me that she no longer
had a birthday present from us -- so we shopped, and found three
nice shirts for about the price of the clock, thanks to January
sales. She was very set up by having something new to wear, but
of course buying something new for the very old entails more than
a few alterations. As the padding between the vertebrae dries
up and is worn away, the spine shortens. Mother used to be 5'4"
tall. She's now 4'8". In addition to that problem, the arthritis
in her hands makes buttoning small buttons very difficult. I've
tried to suggest pullovers, but cervical arthritis of the neck
makes pulling anything over her head quite painful. So buying
something new means that adaptive measures must be taken. I'd
be happy to let the store do the alterations, but Mother can't
stand long enough for a fitter to mark the garments. By now I've
learned exactly what needs doing, and while it's not altogether
easy, neither is it rocket science.
First I (a) shortened
the shirts by 3 inches, (b) cut off all buttons (cuffs included),
(c) sewed them back atop the buttonholes, (d) sewed half a snap
behind them, and (e) sewed the other half where the button had
been. Two days, 24 buttons, 48 snap halves, and five sore digits
on my right hand later, I was done. I put the shirts in Mother's
wardrobe with much relief....but then I took her washing out of
the hamper, and there amongst the dirty clothes was the shirt
from the laundry, the "not well ironed" shirt I'd had pressed
professionally. It wasn't dirty, but it had three safety pins
next to three buttons. This is usually a signal that one of the
snaps has pulled off (she tends to rip off her shirts with playful
glee when getting ready for bed, because snaps are so much easier
than buttons, but after a while the snaps pull loose). This time,
however, the snaps were there. They had just been squashed flat
by the laundry's presser, a device that turns out beautifully
ironed shirts but gives no quarter to the male half of a snap!
So I was back to the needle and thread with my sore fingers. I
'm afraid she'll just have to put up with "not well ironed"
from now on.
Which brings to mind
a dour little ditty that has been bandied around in my family
for at least a hundred and fifty years:
"There's too much
of worriting goes to a bonnet;
There's too much of ironing goes to a shirt.
There's nothing that's worth all the work you put on it;
There's nothing that lasts except trouble and dirt."
You'd better believe
it!
Part
One, Part Two
