Aging Parents, Getting Lost, and a Horrible Weekend

Sometimes words do not have the power to really express the level of frustration I feel when dealing with my aging parents. I try to be patient, I try to be helpful, and I try to be understanding. But when I consistently receive phone calls after 10 pm on a school night, waking me from a peaceful slumber, I first get nervous that it's an emergency and then I get a little pissed when I find out it's not.

My mother has a tendency to call whenever something pops into her mind. Because this is usually late at night or early in the morning (very often before 7 am or after 10 pm), I tend to believe the call is likely an emergency and I answer it, only to be asked questions like "Is today Sunday?" or to tell me about the latest argument she had with my father. Until last Friday, it never has been an actual emergency.

Sometime around 2 pm on Friday afternoon my dad dropped my mom off at the hair dressers and he left to go back home to let the dog out and rest before picking her back up. He apparently never made it home. Instead, he wandered around for 12 hours before the police were finally able to track him down through a national Silver Alert. He was nearly 15 miles away and had no recollection of what has happened.

Because my mom calls upwards of 6 times a day, it is sometime difficult for me to want to answer each and every call, let alone be able to answer that many calls during work hours. The night before my dad disappeared, my mom had called me with her weekly complaint that, "I can't take it any more. I need to leave him." So I listened and then politely got off the phone given that it was 10:30 pm on a school night and I was dead asleep when she called. So when she left 3 messages in a row on Friday afternoon and I was clear up in Ft. Lauderdale at a conference getting ready to fight rush hour traffic on the two-hour drive home, I chose to let voicemail pick it up and listen to it later. By the time I heard her messages and then spoke to the police, he had already been gone 4 hours. I hit Facebook immediately with "Missing" flyers. Close to 20,000 people saw the flyer that night and then the same group saw the updated "Found" post at 3:30 am. It was amazing the number of people who jumped in to help in any way they could.

But back to the mom who cried wolf—so many calls each and every day wear thin on even the most patient of people. But this time, there was an emergency.

We are now working to find out what happened to dad. I'm learning all kinds of new terms like TIA, gathering information on GPS devices for their car, and trying to figure out the least invasive way to have home health care visit their home on a regular basis every week. We now start a series of tests—CT scans, memory tests, blood work, etc.

This is new territory for all of us, but my mom (the legally blind one) has given me a lot of pushback on any assistance. I know there will be many posts here about this on-going issue. Old age is not going to be reversed. Hopefully professionals can help me show my parents that the longer they live, the more likely it is they will start to need help. And help doesn't mean taking away their freedom, it means keeping their freedom as long as possible. Aging gracefully doesn't come easy to everyone, but I'm praying that we all smoothly ease into this next phase of life.

Spread Your Wings!