Christmas? Making a list and checking it twice...NOT!
Do you think I can get away with a really pretty watercolor painting (copied 15 times) that simply states:
Coming in January
Your Christmas Gift!
Maybe I'll just buy the whole family tickets to Jumanji and matching socks!
Somehow a real disconnect has occurred in my life. Makes me sad and extremely disappointed in myself.
Until the age of 9, I lived in Colorado, surrounded by a huge , loving family. Grandparents, Great-Uncles and Aunts, Aunts and Uncles, and Cousins...oh man, the cousins!
We spent weekends with grandparents or cousins. We were the family that had great family picnics at City Park, playing softball and chowing down on the best fried chicken and potato salad in the world...IN THE WORLD! We would caravan to campgrounds in the Rockies and set up a little town of tents. There were guitars and singing, jokes, lots and lots of love and laughter.
At 9 years old, Dad, Mom, brother and sister packed it all up and moved to California. We grew up with only occasional visits from the elderly people in our family. We were four states away as health failed them. All grandparents, as well as, the great-aunts and great uncles, and most of the aunts and uncles are gone. We attended funerals but not bedside vigils. I don't remember my parents struggling with healthcare decisions for their parents.
As an adult, I worked in the health care field. Started in acute care but ended up as Public Relations Director and Field Supervisor for a skilled nursing facility and a home health private division nursing agency.
I truly believed I was in touch with our patients and residents, family members, too. I helped families in crisis make decisions and choices between home nursing or convalescent centers. I helped with end-of-life decisions. I believed I was good at it. I could read family members and know who could handle what.
I held many a hand, or stroked a head, as patients without family passed, sometimes in the earliest hours of the day or late night. I loved them all. It was hard work but rewarding, and I loved it. I thought I had a solid handle on the aging process. I thought I was helping, providing comfort and somehow easing the stresses.
My parents are now both 89, failing in health and in an ugly, emotional crisis. Hell, the whole family seems to be tumbling into the rabbit hole!
While in the middle of this family implosion of frailties and emotions, I have discovered that I don't know anything. There is a bottomless depth of emotion when it is your own parents. There is no clocking-out and going home. If you do happen to be home, you lay awake, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the phone to ring. Hell, I can't even have a drink because it is a 45 minute drive to the folks house and I need to get to them, not end up in the back of a police cruiser (though, at times, I have wished for exactly that). When one family member yells 'Uncle" and bails because it is too hard, biting our lips, we pick up the pieces he dropped on the way out.
I owe a huge apology to all those family members, patients and residents. I am sincerely sorry for not recognizing the depth of your pain, frustration, stress, love, worry, and the seemingly thousands of emotions that lodge in one's brain during crisis and make themselves at home.
I am so sorry!
