Category: Aging Parents

This is the second in an occasional series I will be working on called, Aging Parents.  This is where my head and heart are at right now, as my family works to help my Dad cope with his own aging. 

There will come a time, if we live long enough, that we will have to let something we love go.  This letting go is a heartbreaking part of life, our reward for achieving old age.  It sucks and it’s hard and there is no getting out of it.  Oh, Life, you are a cruel mistress.

As my family works to help my Dad transition homes, from his super cool bachelor pad condo in the South Loop with a stellar view of Chicago’s skyline, to a decidedly less cool assisted living unit with a view of the adjacent cemetery (no, I am not joking), decisions will need to be made. What to keep, what to move, what to trash, etc.  It’s a ruthless task, the letting go.

For nine years I worked as a social worker in a swanky retirement community.  If my daughter had not been diagnosed with cancer, I am fairly confident that I would still be there.  I loved my work, I loved the community where I worked, I loved being around older adults.  My time was spent helping them and their families cope with the losses associated with aging.  I was always very busy.

The stakes are high in old age, so very much that can be lost.  For some, the loss is gradual and prolonged.  For others, the losses are like what you see out your car window speeding down an expressway — they happen so fast, you barely even recognize them.  Zing!, there goes your spouse of 56 years; Whiz!, you blink and your memory declines; Zoom!, vacate your home immediately.  This can leave a lot of older adults and their families with a sense of whiplash.

So much of aging is about letting go.  The lucky ones manage to find grace, gently releasing their grasp on the things and people that are most beloved to them.  Many others, the unlucky ones, struggle with it.  Faced with loss, they grasp tighter, white knuckling the life they had, but no longer do.  It will break your heart six ways to Sunday.

The painting above hangs in my dining room.  It is oil, gorgeous and arresting.  I fell in love with it the moment I saw it.  I was young when it was purchased, just around 30 or so.  Buying art felt extravagant and grown up. It was done by a woman named Jackie Sullivan, who happened to live in the retirement community where I worked.  Jackie was a well known artist in Chicago’s North Shore.

Because of her own aging, Jackie was closing her studio.  She was losing her vision and would no longer be working in oils or able to keep a studio. She told me this all matter of factly, as I looked through her canvasses that she had stacked against the walls of her apartment, for sale.  I wanted all of them, I had money for one.  Here this older woman was selling me her art, but also teaching me a lesson about letting go.

For most of her career Jackie had worked in oil on large canvasses.  That is a pretty particular way to create art.  With her diminishing eye sight, oil was now out of the question for her.  Instead, she told me, she would be switching to water colors — a medium that did not require separate studio space, so she could do it right there at the retirement community.

I didn’t realize it at the time, I was young and in the stage of life that is all about acquiring, but fifteen years later, today, I thought about Jackie Sullivan and her grace, her letting go, at what had to have been a horribly painful time for her.  This concept of “letting go” has been on my mind a lot these past few months.

In the coming days and weeks, I will watch and support my Dad as he continues his own process of letting go.  It is a very solitary thing, the letting go.  You can have an army of help at your disposal, but ultimately, it’s just you and the things you are losing — your health, your memory, your identity, your posh view, your independence, your books, your kitchen, your freedom, your dignity, your husband, your wife, your car, your doctor, your keys, even.

Things big and small fall through your fingers, things concrete and abstract, all gone, poof.  We tell the older people in our lives that it will be okay. That’s not always the truth.  The letting go hurts.

This is the first in an occasional series I will be working on called, Aging Parents.  This is where my head and heart are at right now, as my family works to help my Dad cope with his own aging. 

I used to work in a high rise office in downtown Chicago during my early and mid-20s.  When I got my first apartment, I would take the bus to get there or do other errands around town.  I was always struck, feeling literal pangs in my heart, when an older adult would slowly and carefully and slowly and carefully and slowly and carefully get on the bus and look for a seat.  Almost always they carried some sort of bag with them.  If I was near the front I would pop up to offer my seat, knowing too many others would not, and cursing those young and healthy jerks inside my head.

Old age was hard.  Seeing it made me sad.  It was difficult to imagine things like buying groceries or mailing a letter as a struggle, but after seeing that reality every day for the older folks in my neighborhood I no longer had to imagine, because I saw their challenges.  And then, just a few years later, on the cusp of finishing my graduate program in social work and being saddled with BUCKETS of student loan debt, the first job offer I got was working with older adults.

I took it.  My fear of impending loan payments was much higher than my fear of older adults.

Turns out, I loved it.  Loved it.  And I was good at it.  My little unwrinkled, idealistic 29 year old self was tasked with the work of helping older adults in a fancy, posh retirement community cope with the difficulties and losses of aging.  The thing about aging is that nothing can protect you from it. Sure, money can insulate you some and keep you from hard labor, but if we are lucky enough, we all get older.  Those dollars and cents won’t protect anyone.

My work felt like a calling to me.  Listening and helping and empathizing were all in my wheelhouse.  It didn’t hurt that my own vernacular matched that of my 80 and 90 year old clients, either, what with all the “swells” and “good eggs” that my friends mocked my use of.  Working with older adults and their families was a privilege that I remember fondly.

There was the “spinster twin” — her language, not mine — who found herself utterly lost and helpless after her other spinster twin died.  There was the brilliant physicist whose brain was fading with dementia.  There was the kind hearted widower who kept a framed photo of his wife at the kitchen table so he could still eat breakfast with his gal every day.  There was the never married career woman, still as proud at 85 as she was at 45, who struggled hard every day to look lovely in her pearls and fine clothing, but wept with me each week because no one understood how hard that had become for her.

Remembering these folks, these people that somehow trusted me with their sorrows and pain and secrets, has me weeping.  My tears are for me as much as for them today.  In the past two months, my family has watched the roaring lion that is my father, my Da, age in rapid fashion.  It is breaking my heart.  It is breaking his heart.  It is breaking all the hearts.

Old age is not for sissies.

That was the message that hung on my office wall in needlepoint form that I found at a thrift store during those years I worked with older adults. And dagnabbit if I can’t find it now, as I want to gift it to my father.  I stopped working with older adults almost eight years ago now, but the truth of those pithy words stayed with me. To be an independent, strong, functioning person and then lose those capacities for whatever reason is not, in fact, for sissies.  You need the strength of steel to age.  You need the strength of Goliath and Davey combined to wake up day after day after day when your world, because of your aging, shrinks beyond recognition.

As a 45 year old with much more experience under my belt, I know now that those pangs I felt watching older adults struggle on the bus was pity.  I pitied them.  Pffft.  I had no freaking idea of the strength and courage and perseverance I was witnessing.

When you see an older adult, if you are lucky enough to have some in your life, try hard not to pity them.  Instead, see them as the strong humans they are.  Tell them you honor and appreciate their strength and courage.  They need that and they’ve certainly earned it.