The Packet Rat

It’s now just about a year since my parents’ twin health crises became emergent. A lot has happened. There are many people I am grateful to, including my management at my employer for making it possible to keep my job and deal with the relocation of both parents, hospitalization of one, and the finding of long-term housing and care for both. Work has become more normal, and more sustainable, while my parents’ situation is more sustainable but far from “normal”…though my relationship with them was never “normal,” whatever that is.

Mom is deeper into dementia. What had been a short-term memory loss issue has progressed to sundowning episodes where she reverts to her late teens and early 20s (while still somehow recognizing me as her son). She still manages daily life with not a whole lot of assistance, but a lot of screaming from my dad

The week before July 4, we drove 500 miles to my parents’ house to start the process of selling it. That meant cleaning it out, a task we have yet to complete but have gotten a great deal of help with from Cindy, the woman who has done house cleaning for my parents for over 20 years. My parents, as the real estate agent said charitably, were/are “savers”–not quite to the level of extreme hoarding, but they never threw out or otherwise disposed of anything that they assigned any value to.

My mom had been an avid digital photographer. Until about 10 years ago, she sold landscape and architectural photo prints at the local farmers market and at craft shows. She also kept every camera she or my dad ever owned, often leaving film or memory cards in the ones she abandoned, piled into boxes or oversized camera bags that had fallen out of favor in a corner of her office space. I retrieved some of them on our trip, and found a decade-old memory card in a Nikon D90 with photos she had taken–including photos of my daughter as a teenager while on a trip to Florida with them, and of their (and previously my brother’s) dog Hagen.

Photos from BSG, 2016

his was by no means the only little time capsule we came across–the whole house (especially the garage) was filled with things that could only be summed up with the interjection “What the fuck, Dad?” shouted rhetorically into the not-void.

Long after he had stopped doing anything with them, my dad obsessively purchased and collected model trains– Lionel and other O27 and O gauge, HO, and especially N gauge model engines and railcars, sets, track, and accompanying model buildings and landscape items. He did not keep these in any sort of good order; luckily he stored about half of the Lionel trains in their original boxes, but not in a way that enhanced their value. Toward the end of his residence in that house, he had a couple of N-gauge train cars in their boxes (and one out of its box) under the flip up seat on his “cadillac walker” that he had purchased during recovery from knee replacement and had begun to use again as vascular disease he ignored made it more difficult for him to walk without falling.

I was unaware of how bad things had gotten for one reason in particular: the distance between us, both physical and emotional. We only saw my parents once or twice a year, often not at their home.

As the kids got older, it became much harder to muster a family trip to see them, and when they had all started independent lives we honestly didn’t *want* to visit them. It was an obligation that usually came with a list of tasks and a lot of shouting when we tried to fix things that were not on the list but obviously in need of repair.

We would end up spending the time occupying the same space at best. There was resentment from my parents when we left the house to do something without them–passive aggression from my mother, grumbling and shouting from my father. The guilt trips we got from my mother for taking our daughter to a cat show in a nearby city allegedly without asking if she wanted to go are something of legend.

But they never really wanted to go anywhere because the only thing shorter than their patience and attention span was their stamina for getting off their asses. When we took my mom on another day trip, she ended up spending most of her time on a bench.

This, it turns out, was because of medical issues my father never mentioned and outright ignored himself, both his own and my mother’s . I knew she had back pain from her scoliosis, never addressed when she was younger ; she also had had her thyroid zapped due to hyperthyroid in her 40s, but her medication was not particularly well managed.

As for my father, he had never fully recovered mobility after a second knee replacement resulting from a botched first surgery–that resulted in a monthslong staph infection raging in my father’s leg that was ignored by his Physician’s Assistant in multiple surgical followups. And his mobility deteriorated further because he had been ignoring his Type II Diabetes diagnosis and his resulting peripheral artery disease in his legs. As a result, he depended on two hiking sticks to help him get around–which made him look like he was a novice downhill skier. He fell a lot.

He fell again today at the assisted living center. I don’t have the details, but I assume it was while he was doing physical therapy exercises with his walker and his prosthetic leg. I only know because I got a call after the fact that he had been taken to an emergency room in an ambulance to be checked out. [He broke two ribs while doing his physical therapist’s exercise with the walker on his own in his room, tripping on his own wheelchair because he hadn’t moved it out of the way.]

Ours is not a unique experience, I know. There are untold legions of GenXers and late Boomers faced with providing care for their parents. Some are “lucky” and have siblings to share the load. (Your mileage with lucky may vary.)

My brother killed himself 15 years ago. This is a complicating factor I may need a while to find a delicate way to talk about. But in short, he never escaped the trap my parents set for him. My parents’ view of mental health as a stigma didn’t help.

So here I am, with parents 23 years older than me, wondering if I will survive them or if they [and my father in particular] will extract every bit of the joy (and whatever savings I have for “retirement”, lol) from my remaining years of good health. I am obligated to them, but I also feel imprisoned by them.