My dad and two daughters when he was enjoying better health.
Grandparents are children too.
When you’re a grandmother with beautiful children and grandchildren, and balancing the needs of an aging parent who still looks to you as his “child”, life gets complicated. As if life weren’t complicated enough, an ailing parent can create all types of emotions, challenges, and situations in life for their children — at any age.
I recently wrote about my father being diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. He has now been diagnosed with frequent TIAs (mini-strokes) which are robbing him of his strength and ability to handle his daily grooming needs among other things. He has little strength to simply move from a bed to his chair. These little strokes happen so quickly and so often, the doctors say he doesn’t have time to recover from one before he has another one and that robs him of energy and strength.
The scariest thing about this situation is that mini-strokes are usually markers, or precursors, to a pending big stroke that can cause great physical damage or worse. But there is nothing that can be done about them now.
So we wait.
And take care of him the best way we know how.
A recent visit to stay with him for a few days brought memories and tears. We have had to have a hospital bed replace his own bed – just to make it easier for him to get up and down. But seeing the cold, metal mechanical hospital bed in his room, to replace the worn wooden bed that he and my mother had purchased the year they were married almost 60 years ago, was almost unbearable.
My dad says not to worry. It’s temporary.
I wish I shared his optimism (or naivety), but I am more of a realist. I remember the day we moved my mother into a separate bedroom with a hospital bed, and her declining health eventually led to her passing away three years ago. The memories flood back and the tears still trickle some days.
Yes, I am a mother and a grandmother. But I am also a daughter. That means that I will figure out how to make this all work, just like thousands of others caught in this sandwich generation. We never stop being children, but our roles just reverse over time.
When my days with my dad are toughest, I watch my grandchildren with their endless energy, enthusiasm, inquisitiveness and joy of everyday things in life. As I look at my frail father while his health slowly deteriorates, I am reminded that every day with him is a gift. And just like the gifts under the Christmas tree, or the gifts around the birthday table, we never know when we will open the last gift.
I think I will try really hard to enjoy the gift of today, because I never know when it will be the last one.
