On Growing Old

[The People]

Yesterday I spent the day with a couple in their eighties. When I moved here 9 years ago they took me under their wing and helped me find places, get me to appointments etc. Now they are so fragile. He has Alzheimer's but it is at the point where he is just calm and happy. She is struggling with that along with the loss of a brother last week. She has a lo of physical pain but as she tends to keep a lot inside I wonder how much of it is emotional.

They have 1 son who has schizophrenia. He is well enough that he can help out but not so much that he can take over and organize things. Partly because Mom would never let him.

I look at them and wonder about me in a decade or 2.

[MakersDozn]

Hearing you. Now that both of our parents are gone, it's been quite a reality check for us.

Our father's first cousin is 91 years old. She was 15 when our father was born. She's in an assisted living facility. Because she never married or had children, her nieces and nephew (all in their fifties) look after her. You may recall us posting several years ago about how those three cousins lost their parents in a bus accident.

We chose not to marry or have children. We don't have what it takes to be an effective spouse or parent. The trade-off is that we don't have someone to look after us in our old age, unless we can count on our nieces. We don't think it's fair to burden them, but then again, would we say the same thing if we had children of our own?

Times like this we wish we could hide in our inside world and stay there.

MDs

[The People]

We think we would like to live in a seniors place as we age. A place where people look after you. A place where you can make friends. But we have no money so we might have to move south and live in a refrigerator box.

[MakersDozn]

We have mixed feelings about senior facilities.

The staff in the rehab centers where our father stayed several times were well-intentioned but often micromanaged the residents. It became clear to us that he would never want to live in one permanently. He left this world on his own terms.

MDs