For many of us, it begins with a phone call. In our case, the call came from my 89 year old father late in the spring of 2008. He had been released from Waterman Hospital after his third bout with pneumonia a few weeks earlier. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “why am I here when you are there?”
We had often encouraged Dad to consider moving from his home at an assisted living facility in Central Florida to join us in Denver where Bill and I have lived for the past twenty years. Up until now he had always resisted the idea. “I’ll never leave Florida,” he would say with conviction.
His sudden change of heart pleased me at the same time that it scared me. Long distance caregiving made it hard to sort out just how well or how poorly he was actually doing. The assisted living staff always took the default position that “Frank is doing great!” And yet one hospital doctor had told me in a semi-frantic phone call that Dad would need a feeding tube or would have to be fed by an attendant for the rest of his life.
Part of the time I focused on the plus side of having him closer to us in Denver. We would be able to determine the truth about his condition. Knowing the truth, we would be able to help him enjoy a healthier and less isolated life. I had the romantic notion that with better care and more attention I would get back the dapper and urbane father of my youth. We would attend concerts and lectures together. I might drop in at cocktail hour, and he would introduce me to his new friends. Or I might bring by a thermos of lemonade for us to drink on the patio outside his room on balmy fall afternoons.
At other times I couldn’t stop my fears from surfacing. Where would I find the energy, the wisdom, the capacity to rise to the unknown demands of this new caregiving situation? I had not lived near my father since my college graduation. I had seen him more regularly since the death of my stepmother in 1999, but he had changed so much in recent years. He was frail and shaky on his feet. He was distracted and vague. He seemed diminished in ways I couldn’t understand. Did I know him at all anymore? Could we make a loving connection out of our new roles of caregiver and cared for? Could we really integrate him into our family life? How would his presence and his need impact my ability to work or to carry out the normal activities of my daily routine? Would I be able to care for him adequately and still take care of myself?
There would follow many months of outward questioning and inner struggle before I could address my doubts and fears constructively. Throughout these months I felt that I was failing my father nearly every day. I felt guilty and angry and powerless. I was not living up to my expectations of myself as a mature, compassionate and understanding daughter. I had yet to let go of any idea that I could be “good” or “helpful” to my father. I had yet to begin to face the impact of his situation on my sense of myself now, and on my fears for my own future as an aging person. But as time went by I began to experience a shifting within myself and, oddly, from my father’s side as well.
