What should I do with my aging parents?
Hi.
Welcome to today's Little Lesson.
Thank you so much for joining me.
This is a question today that I was asked some time ago and waited to address it.
It's one that's very close to me because both of my parents, my mother and father, are now
with the Lord.
But I lost my mom about four years ago, lost my dad just a few months ago.
Prior to my dad's passing, and my mom's passing, both of them lived with myself and my wife
(and our kids in the latter years when they were still living at home prior to their marriages),
and so we were, very, very, very close.
My parents loved the Lord, and it was evident in their lives.
It was a joy, really, to have them live with us, although my mother developed aphasia,
which it started showing up in her life as, in her daily life when she couldn't remember
nouns.
We'd hold an object up and say, "Mom, what is this?" and she'd say, "Well, I know what
it is, I know what that is, I just can't think of the word for it," and I'd say, "This is
a grape," and she goes, "Oh, that's right.
That's a grape.
Yeah.
That's a grape."
Then you wait one minute, and then, "Mom, what is this?"
"Ah, I can't think of the name of that," and it was a grape.
That got progressively worse, and my dear father did his best to care for her.
He prioritizes that.
He put a lot of other things aside just to focus on my mother.
The stress on him was incredible, but he persevered.
Then she suffered a massive stroke and passed away a few days after that.
It was bittersweet.
We, of course, missed her, but we knew she was in Heaven, and the stress was off my dad.
But that meant it wasn't my mom and dad living with us.
It was my dad, and my kids had all left the nest.
We loved having my dad live with us.
He had kind of a separate apartment, so he was very independent, able to drive, and carried
on a ministry serving every week in several assisted-living facilities with doing little
church services, little Bible studies for the elderly residents of those places.
But then my dad suffered a stroke that disabled him.
It changed his personality a little bit, but more evident, he lost his dexterity, he was
unable to walk.
His one side had been paralyzed, basically, and through therapy and rehabilitation, he
did improve, but eventually plateaued, and so he was bound on wheelchair, couldn't get
out of bed himself, and so forth.
He went through residential therapy for several months after his stroke, and then it kind
of plateaued at a skilled nursing facility where he was.
The professionals there told him, "Well, your insurance is not going to pay for this any
longer, and so you have to leave, and you need to go to an assisted-living facility."
My dad said, "No, no, no.
I'm going to go home and live with my son and his wife."
He never really offered any of us any other option than that.
Of course, we loved him.
We wanted to do what was best for him.
I'm sure that's what you would want done for you, and I'm sure that's what you would do
for anyone that you loved, parent or sibling or whatever.
That's what you do, and so many, many people do this, will care for you.
Of course, some people are able to retire, or they are retired by that point in time
when their parents need all that care, and so they're able to devote their full amount
of time to them, and that's very admirable of them.
My hats off to them.
We did it, but it brought a lot of stress to my life just because I was trying to hold
down my own full-time job as well as other responsibilities I had outside my job as well
as take care of my dad.
Again, he couldn't get out of a chair without help.
He couldn't go to the bathroom without help.
He couldn't take a shower, bathe himself.
He needed a lot of care, and so I did my very best to try to do that for as long as I could
and eventually realized, "I can't do this."
We began to bring in helpers and so forth, private aids, and some agency aids and so
forth, but it was extremely stressful.
I'm probably talking to a lot of people here who themselves are at that place or they know
that that day could come for them.
Well, that's the difficulty.
It's not an easy decision to know what to do.
But I've been talking the last couple of Little Lessons about some peculiarities of the Amish,
of which I have some good friends among them.
I ask them, "What do you do with your elderly parents when they're not able to function
independently any longer?"
I, of course, I knew the answer, but I just wanted to hear what they'd say.
I said, "Do you have a special home that you put them?"
"Oh, no, no, no.
We care for them in our own homes until they die."
But then my one very close Amish friend said, "We have a saying amongst us."
He said, "One sick person can kill two healthy people."
Now, let that sink in for a minute because there's so much wisdom and truth in that.
One sick person can kill two healthy people.
He's referring to the fact that it brings so much stress and strain into a household,
into a family when an elderly adult needs a lot of assistance and attention.
This is why so many people wind up having to put their parents into assisted-living
facilities, and of course, everyone's situation is different.
I ask the question, and I'm not going to fully answer it on this Little Lesson.
I'm going to have to spill into the next one.
What do you do with your elderly parents?
Well, you love them as best you can, but you also have to be realistic, and that's the
most difficult thing because those two things clash with each other, and our realism clashes
with our love.
For me, being so close to my dad for so long and him living with us, I could never tell
him, "No, you can't come home and live with us."
Of course, we wanted him home.
We never wanted him to be in an assisted-living facility, but here's what happened.
Under all the stress of trying to take of my dad, hold down my job, take care of other
responsibilities, and so forth, I had a stroke myself.
It was not a full-blown stroke.
It's what's called a mini stroke, but I woke up one more, had a strange sensation in my
head.
I tried to button my shirt, and my hand kept falling off my shirt.
I tried to tie me shoes, and my one hand kept falling off my shoe.
I knew something was wrong.
My wife rushed me to the emergency room at the local hospital, and they diagnosed me.
"You had a mini stroke.
All your symptoms will probably resolve themselves in a day or two," which they did.
Well, I'm out of time for today's Little Lesson.
I think I'll pick up right here on tomorrow's Little Lesson.
I hope you'll join me.