How are your parents?

Rev. Powell · January 13, 2022, 09:22:51 PM

So my father is undergoing heart valve repair surgery. He survived the operation and is doing well, but he'll be spending several more days in the hospital recuperating before he's able to come home. So I've moved in to his house and am taking care of my mom, who has dementia and needs 24 hour supervision. (I have a new respect for his heroic efforts in caring for her now.)

I've reached the age where I'm taking care of my parents, which is a scary place to be in life.

Anyway, I thought it make a good topic: how are your folks? Do you have a good relationship? Have they passed on?

RCMerchant · January 13, 2022, 09:29:27 PM

My folks are dead.

LilCerberus · January 13, 2022, 09:34:38 PM

My mom's in fair shape for her age, considering....

My stepdad woke up about a week before christmas & wasn't his usual talkative self....
He was hospitalized for a couple of days & sent home, but he's still prety quiet....

Rev. Powell · January 13, 2022, 09:46:04 PM

Quote from: LilCerberus on January 13, 2022, 09:34:38 PM

My stepdad woke up about a week before christmas & wasn't his usual talkative self....
He was hospitalized for a couple of days & sent home, but he's still prety quiet....

What happened?

indianasmith · January 13, 2022, 09:57:13 PM

I was blessed with the best parents any man could ever ask for; my Dad was a full time pastor and my Mom was an English teacher.
I loved them to the moon and back.
Dad passed in 2017 at the age of 90; Mom died two years later when she was 87.
I miss them to this day.

LilCerberus · January 13, 2022, 10:00:01 PM

Quote from: Rev. Powell on January 13, 2022, 09:46:04 PM
Quote from: LilCerberus on January 13, 2022, 09:34:38 PM

My stepdad woke up about a week before christmas & wasn't his usual talkative self....
He was hospitalized for a couple of days & sent home, but he's still prety quiet....

What happened?

He was treated for a urinary tract infection, but my mom says she could see it coming....
I forget if he's 94 or 97, but he's been around a while.......

chainsaw midget · January 13, 2022, 10:16:24 PM

My mom's in good shape. I usually stop over and see her once or twice a month.

My dad's health isn't as great, but it hasn't been great for a long time and it's never been something that slowed him down. He currently uses a wheelchair because he doesn't want to have to go through any more surgeries. He says he's 75 and has already been through enough in his life. I usually talk to him once a month or so over the phone, although last year I went up and spent a week visiting.

Leah · January 13, 2022, 11:24:19 PM

My dad has an infection he thinks. Both of my parents went to two covid testing sites, both are negative for covid. Other than that they're in good shape.

claws · January 14, 2022, 12:31:49 AM

My mom passed unexpectedly from a heart attack in 2010 one day after new years.

When my mom married my dad they moved to America. My dad's parents and family rejected and hated her because she was German. They didn't help or support her when my dad was in vietnam. My dad raised hell when he got back and was told about his parents behaviour. After that they slowly accepted her.

She didn't have a nice childhood, she was abused mentally and physically by her parents until she moved out. In later years she took care of her once abusive mother.

My mom was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia that was untreated for most of her life. She thought everybody was plotting against her, and everybody was trying to poison her.
She also had a prescription drug and painkiller addiction. She believed she had rheumatism and slowly gave up on walking. We had to buy her a wheelchair. She drank for several years and would later tell us she drank to mute the voices in her head caused by schizophrenia.
My mom was a beautiful woman, very intelligent and fearless. Miss her much.

My dad passed in 2016 after being in a special care home for people with alzheimer's disease for one year. His condition got worse after mom died. We tried to take care of him the best we could for the longest time, but he needed professional care. He died of complications related to alzheimer's disease.

Dad was a vietnam veteran, that caused him lifelong nightmares (screaming in his sleep. We always had to wake him up) and to become an alcoholic. He was the coolest dad imaginable when he was drunk, but difficult to live with when he was sober. He did quit drinking about 25 years before he died, but he never could get rid off the nightmares.

Both my parents had natural forest burials. My mom always hated the idea of graveyards, coffins and tombstones.

ER · January 14, 2022, 12:37:41 AM

Nice of you to ask, and good luck with your role in your parents' lives, and good luck to your parents too in all that they're facing. Old age is for the brave.

My parents? Oh, boy. Yeah.

My parents are well in their health and not what you'd call old, my mom was born in the 1960s, for instance, but they have a complicated relationship. My mom was seventeen when she married my father, who was twenty, and then ten months later I was born, or who knows what might have played out. I think my father always loved my mother more than she loved him, and plus he was away a lot with his job when I was young, so sometimes it felt just a little like I was raised in a single-parent home. Not quite and not entirely fair to say that, but it did. And then there were family tragedies too that I know had to have left scars and changed the landscape of my parents life together.

Anyway, I mention that because for the second time my mom suddenly left my father. She first did it when I was in tenth grade, maybe I missed warning signs then but it caught me totally off guard, and she did it again a year ago, also when I did not see it coming, just walked away and went back to her country, leaving my dad stuck wondering how things will work out, though so far he seems content letting her be away and not saying anything bad about her, even if this is clearly desertion.

In the last....decade....my mother took on a personality change like I've never seen, going from this ethereal, stress-less person, to someone obsessed with some world events, and since then honestly it's like she can't be conversed with except in a narrow band of topics that she considers more important than any other, and you have to walk an extremely fine line with her or she flies off into states of fury that are as strange as they are distressing. It's like she has a monomania about some matters, but she doesn't otherwise seem mentally ill or impaired, she has just....invested herself in some social and political issues to the exclusion of all the rest that life offers. (After a lifetime of utter political indifference and ignorance.)

Sometimes it has been like I have defended her in my own way by advocating some of her extreme causes even when I didn't actually share them. It was like I wanted others to reject what I was saying, because I didn't believe it myself, yet also wanted others to agree with her extreme ideas when I'd put them forward and by doing that affirm that maybe she wasn't so out there after all. It's like she's joined a cult, though she hasn't, it just feels that way.

So I have no idea what the future holds for my parents either individually or separately, or what my mom wants from or with my father or how long he will live alone and put up with her living across the ocean, or what would make her happy, or if she'll ever live in the United States again, but as time goes by I find myself less and less attached to my mother, or at least I find life moving on and she's not part of it.

And that's sad.

Alex · January 14, 2022, 02:34:23 AM

In the past few years, my mother has survived breast cancer and a brain aneurysm thanks to the NHS. Outside of that, she seems to keep fairly good health despite her lifelong smoking habit. I try to speak to her on a weekly basis and we visit each other (in normal times anyway), several times a year. She dotes on Ash and we have a rule that we don't say no to anything grandparents want to buy for him.

My dad, I wouldn't p**s on if he was on fire.

Trevor · January 14, 2022, 09:19:10 AM

Quote from: Rev. Powell on January 13, 2022, 09:22:51 PM
So my father is undergoing heart valve repair surgery. He survived the operation and is doing well, but he'll be spending several more days in the hospital recuperating before he's able to come home. So I've moved in to his house and am taking care of my mom, who has dementia and needs 24 hour supervision. (I have a new respect for his heroic efforts in caring for her now.)

I've reached the age where I'm taking care of my parents, which is a scary place to be in life.

Anyway, I thought it make a good topic: how are your folks? Do you have a good relationship? Have they passed on?

First of all, respect to Rev for looking after your folks.

My Dad passed in 2008 (16 May at 8 am) and I have never gotten over that loss.
Mom is still in care after suffering a stroke on 15 July 2020 and she is not the same anymore

HappyGilmore · January 18, 2022, 10:00:15 AM

Have a terrible relationship with the dad. He's just moved to Florida, has had three heart operations and guzzles more than a case of beer a day.

Mom is fine, we've a good relationship.

WingedSerpent · January 18, 2022, 08:31:22 PM

Last year my mom started having these extreme dizzy spells. There were times she would get so sick, she couldn't move. She saw her doctor and right now is on an extremely low sodium diet. She hasn't had one in a while. But has to really watch what she's eating.

My Dad's doing fine.

Newt · January 19, 2022, 08:20:32 AM

My Dad passed suddenly in his sleep in 2006. My Mom is the same as ever (which is saying a lot), but aging. Diabetic now and possibly anorexic. Still living on her own and keeping on with things. My sisters go to visit and help out with the big stuff (major physical work Mom cannot seem to find anyone to do at a reasonable price) from time to time. I am not in a position to do so.