I've watched my mother hover over her mother as she moans in her sleep. I've wiped away my wet eyes while my grandmother cried in her sleep that she was dying...and we've laughed at her inability to say words ... Don't worry...she laughed at herself first.
In the most tender and amazing way, I've watched as my mother has listened to her mothers fears and has wrestled with the reality of having to move her to a treatment facility better equipped to help her. This is not an easy move. It will be 3 1/2 hours away. Her neighbor cries every time we see her....she gets the sadness...and then there are other people...
We use the words: move to the home.. as if it's just something you do...a part of life...its normal. But it doesn't feel normal. It doesn't feel right. My mother said tonight we are transitioning her to a place that can rehabilitate her body but we don't think about the whole of her. She needs someone who will sit with her, pull her out of her shell, take her to the ice cream social that happens on the first floor, take her to church service on Sunday morning, help her find a friend. God please help her find a friend.
This is no joke. This isn't about putting a woman that can't walk right now in a place where she's just going to live out her days staring out a window...this is my grandmother! She was strong once, and beautiful and ever so slightly OCD...which she proudly passed down to her granddaughters disguised as 'you have to make a bed with clean, unwrinkled, sheets' (and yes I have been known to iron my sheets) and 'when you wipe you fold your toilet paper in a perfect rectangle and then you wipe'...I won't tell you if I still do that or not... She was a perfectionist and she still is. She is still beautiful...and she's frail...and she's afraid. She's not just some old lady in a wheel chair with no mind or desire or heart or hurt or pain or feeling or fears. She is a person. I have to think that so many of our elderly that do check out in the end do so because we don't let them fight for another option. By that I mean we stop engaging them on a personal level that used to be the way we would. We of course can't climb up into their laps as we did when we were little, but we can hold them, kiss them, tell them over and over that we love them...we can ask questions and pull out stories...we can ask them to engage with us and that would cause them to engage their minds and then maybe they wouldn't hide in silence and waste away to speechless hunched over bodies in metal chairs with wheels. We make this new normal an 'oh well' sort of thing and we shrug our shoulders and then we talk loud at our elderly and don't give them much time to respond.
I'm just saying...The next time you see an elderly person...don't minimize them by looking away...make eye contact...smile...treat them like a person...they are wise, deserving of our contact. It's a new normal. It's a new normal that sucks.
And by the way...if you're a server at a restaurant...please...please.... PLEASE stop calling older people 'honey' and 'sweetheart'...respect them with your words...they still deserve a yes ma'am and a yes sir. Just because they may look like their five when their eating doesn't mean they are...and they notice when you demean them. So stop.
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