Tag: aging parents

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Sex & The City

My mother has a boyfriend and they’re inseparable.

It happened when I left for ten days on an out-of-town petsitting job— the longest I’d been away since she’s been in her memory care home. When I returned, there they were, sitting together on the patio love seat.

She’s giddy, obsessed. “Am I wearing enough lipstick? How’s my hair?” she asks, when he knocks on her door. As I let him in, I’m struck by another Freaky Friday reverse parenting moment. Did she feel the same apprehension when I went to the freshman dance with my first boyfriend? When a college boy took me to a concert?

“They’re definitely an item,” says my favorite staff housekeeper. When I ask if she’s ever walked in on a romantic moment between residents, she grins. “At one assisted living place. . . ” She half-kneels, pointing to her mouth.

How could I not laugh?

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Gone Girl

I’ve left mom alone for ten days for a petsitting job, and I’m as nervous as she was when she dropped me at summer camp, age eleven.

She’s not alone, really. The caregivers in her memory care home look out for her 24/7. The care director texts photos of her at cooking club; playing the harmonica; modeling new hats. I should enjoy this time away.

It’s hard, though, after spending four years with someone who panics when I’m not there every day. Parenting roles are reversed in our demented lives and each time I leave, it’s as if she were a child again, scared her mother won’t come back. Even after the hundreds of times I’ve left and returned, all she knows is that in that moment, I am gone.

Eventually, worry lifts; fear subsides and I learn to trust the process.

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Grateful Ned

I don’t write about my father enough.

We talk often, text daily. At 86, he’s remarkably self-sufficient, living contentedly on an island off the coast of Maine. He requires little assistance other than in financial and legal matters. He’s always on the go. He has a “team” of friends and Gilbert the cat to keep him company.

And he’s written a memoir.

Childhood memories were hazy and entire decades blurred, so I asked him to help me piece things together, to tell me his story. Dozens of legal pads later, he painstakingly transcribed his near-illegible penmanship, writing what would become his third book.

My father’s life, I’ve learned, is an endless adventure from the depths of the sea to the vast world beyond. He’s explored the nation, piloting our family across the country in a 1957 Mercedes, and he’s seen the world through the lens of a Greyhound bus windshield. He’s traveled on ships, trains and airplanes to Europe and Scotland, South Africa and South America, Mexico and most recently, on the Trans-Canadian railway through each of that country’s provinces.

Yet, as I edit “Grateful Ned,” his 700-page soul quest, I find that in his perpetual pursuit to live a unique life, we are one. Similar passions flow through our veins like the blood that links us as father and daughter. We share a desire for travel and road trips. A mutual delight in telling stories. A passion for writing. An insatiable thirst for reading. The conscious choice to take the road less traveled.

Even now, my father continues to explore. As he delves further into the past, we both enter a new level of self-discovery. Today, his business cards brand him “EXPLORER.” His sight may grow dim, and his energy level wane, but my father will never stop exploring.

And for this, I am grateful.