I was away for ten days but it felt longer. Partly because I kept changing venues -- a couple of nights with Nina in Oak Park, one night at Nina's mom's place in Kalamazoo, a couple of nights at my brother's house in Aurora, and four nights in Asheville with my parents. The last part of the trip was not so easy. I can see dad struggling with his physical and mental deterioration (he's increasingly forgetful and fretful), and I can see my mom trying to cover for him. I'm worried about the two of them living unassisted. I talk to mom and she acknowledges some of what is going on, but she struggles with the feeling that she's being disloyal. The deal between the two of them has always been that dad is responsible for the planning and arranging of their lives. It's difficult to change that now.
Unlike my two remaining siblings, I can understand why m&d decided to stay in Asheville. I can see how difficult it would be for them to move to a strange place. N is upset because it's harder for her to get to Asheville than to Walnut Creek. And that's true, of course. But I think she's glossing over the difficulty from their point of view. When we talk about it in twos or threes, N and D seem frustrated that m&d haven't changed in their old age -- they are still loners who do not ask for help. I think they are mostly just wishing that the end of m&d's lives could be easier -- that we could follow some kind of script, like a "normal" family. But I don't think there is a script, and I don't want to complain about my parents.
That's not to say that I'm perfectly at peace with them! We bought a smart phone while I was there, so that dad will maybe stop driving and rely mostly on Lyft/Uber. The phone we bought was a samsung that my dad had settled on; I'm not intimately familiar with android phones but I figured I could figure it out. But dad is not in a state of mind to figure things out. His vision and coordination are not great, and he's not used to the touchscreen -- he kept accidentally entering numbers and switching windows and it was very frustrating for him. After about 24 hours of fumbling around, he said he was going to take the phone back. I tried to tell him that he was making progress (slowly!) but he was quite petulant -- and I confess that I didn't have a lot of patience with that, even though I know he's struggling.
