"this is not my beautiful house!"🙃🙂...
in which I vent and offer advice about caring for oldsters, +++ books, comfort food, and protests!
hey-ho!
Thank you in advance for letting me vent! Next week, I promise, back to regularly scheduled programing…
If you’ve been following my diary, The Right To Folly, you know that I’ve been in the thick of oldster care. My obstructionist mother has been handed her ass (fell on the street and then again in her home, the stove spewing gas, EMTs, Adult Protective Services, blah-blah, more and more) and I, an only child, with the loving help of my husband and my closest childhood friend, have been working to keep her safe and housed. I don’t pretend to be alone in dealing with this type of crisis, but if there’s anything you can glean from my experience to avoid chaos and stress with your oldster, please, read on. I will do a little dance knowing I helped.
First, if your friend, family member, or found-family member is going through the experience of stepping in to care for an oldster, please don’t let them flounder. (If there’s someone in my life for whom I didn’t show up enough during a time like this, I am so sorry. I didn’t fully get it. Now I do!)
Ways to show up:
Call frequently, listen, and let your friend repeat themselves without suggesting that they too might be getting a touch of the dementia! 😳
Send memes! Make them laugh! Rinse and repeat
Send pictures of your adorable babies!
Text love notes
Take them on walks in lovely places
Invite them to dinner
Do their laundry
Meet for a drink
Pat them on the back!
If you can, give an hour or two of your time to help with moving, packing, hauling
It is a difficult task to take on the aging and end of life decisions for our oldsters. Let’s undo the aloneness of it!
…
Ten days ago I received a call that my mother would be booted from post-acute care in 72 hours. This was not a drill, but a four alarm fire. In seven days we:
found a clean and well run assisted living facility she can afford by the skin of her teeth
updated her banking situation and dealt with bills… cell phone, health and home insurance, comcast, utilities, +++
emptied the home in which she lived (and low-grade hoarded) for 30+ years.
engaged a realtor and began preparing her home to go on the market
dealt with longterm care insurance (not a happy song and dance!)
recreated her home to the best of my abilities in her new assisted living digs
auto-refill/mail ordered her meds
dealt with medicare and social security
re-homed her dog
…
I’ve not been sleeping, my stomach is constantly churning. It’s a mountain of responsibility. If you are an oldster, I beg you, take part now! Do your Swedish Death Cleaning. Make a plan. Take all the steps to lift some of the burden off your children while you are able.
If you are the incoming responsible party here are things I wish I knew in advance:
Get your name on all your oldsters’ bank accounts. This will make things so much easier when you have to take over bill paying.
Make sure you have an up-to-date financial and medical Power of Attorney. Ours was ‘dusty’ which meant it was potentially too old, we had to get Declarations of Capacity from two doctors, which was like pulling teeth from a rabid dog! I had to press two different social workers to make this happen.
Get your oldster to move to care or accept in-home care before there is a crisis. I tried for five years to get my mother to move. It would have been so much easier if she’d been part of the process.
Make certain your oldster has a POLST, Physician Ordered Life-Sustaining Treatment. This is as crucial, potentially more crucial than Advanced Directives. Your oldsters’ PCP should talk to them about it. Push for this! We struggled to get one done over the phone and had to have a small choir of nurses witness the phone call to make it valid.
Upon arriving in California we spent the first 2 days trying make a dent in clearing out her house. Then I found an Estate Sale Company. I told them they would not be finding a hidden Picasso… and I ended up paying a fair amount of cash to have EVERYTHING hauled away. Best money I ever spent!
If you are nearby, take your oldster for a pedicure regularly. Foot care is nearly impossible for them and it can get feral around the toes.
My oldster has rallied after her fall. Changes are coming swiftly at her, all due to her resistance and unwise choices to be sure, but none-the-less, hard for her to accept. “I miss my house,” she says to me.
No matter what, when you’re in it, be gentle with yourself. Have boundaries. Get outside. Eat well. Drink only a little wine. Laugh whenever you can.
Thank you paid subscribers!
read/don’t write (at least not yet!):
You’ve heard the saying, If you can’t find the book you want to read, then write it yourself.
And, I’m sure you’ve also heard this one, from Ernest Hemingway:
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
The last thing I want to do right now is sign on to spend a year writing a novel about a stubborn and grumpy lady who refuses to accept help in her dotage, but man-0-man, I’d love to be reading one. Something full of wit and absurdity and pathos! I want to cry and laugh and feel less alone. If you know of such a book, do tell!
…
Meanwhile, here are a few books I found:
CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT? by Roz Chast. What more need I say?
SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO, by Lionel Shriver. Shriver is a smart and great writer. I’m picking this one up for certain. From the flap copy:
When her father dies, Kay Wilkinson can’t cry. Over ten years, Alzheimer’s had steadily eroded this erudite man into a paranoid lunatic. Surely one’s own father passing should never come as such a relief.
Kay and her husband Cyril, although healthy and vital in their early fifties, they fear what may lie ahead. Determined to die with dignity, Cyril makes a modest proposal. To spare themselves and their loved ones such a humiliating and protracted decline, they should agree to commit suicide together once they’ve both turned eighty. When their deal is sealed, the spouses are blithely looking forward to another three decades together.
But then they turn eighty. By turns hilarious and touching, playful and grave.
WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, by Matthew Thomas, is about a husband’s descent into Alzheimers and his wife’s attempts to care for him and hold the family together with her two bare hands. The New York Times gave it a stunning review, saying:
Written in calm, polished prose, following one family as its members journey through the decades in an American landscape that is itself in flux, it’s a long, gorgeous epic, full of love and life and caring. It’s even funny, in places — and it’s one of the best novels you’ll read this year.
Finally, GOODBYE, VITAMIN, by Rachel Khong, which I’ve tried to press into your hands in the past. It’s tender, funny and sad, a love letter to an intelligent and intransigent father diagnosed with dementia.
eat:
All I want is comfort food! I haven’t cooked a single thing since I arrived in Santa Cruz and hit the ground running. But, if I could cook, I’d make kid food with a bit of sophistication.
Toum Grilled Cheese Sandwich
For the toum (a creamy Middle Eastern garlic sauce):
1 small head of garlic, peeled (about 8 cloves)
2T lemon juice, plus more to taste
2t kosher salt, plus more to taste
1½ c neutral oil, like grapeseed oil (TBH I will olive oil. I just love the smell and the flavor)
Place garlic, lemon juice, kosher salt and 1 tablespoon water in a food processor and pulse till smooth. Let sit for at least 10 minutes to mellow out some of the raw garlic’s bite.
Turn on the processor and gradually pour in the oil, stopping once or more to scrape down the sides. When emulsified, turn off processor.
Stir well and adjust the toum with more salt and lemon juice as needed. (The toum recipe makes about 1¾ cups.) Transfer to a container with a tight-fitting lid and refrigerate until ready to use.
For the sandwich:
2 slices bread, preferably from a rustic loaf, no more than ½ inch thick
3-4 generous slices Muenster cheese
4 cornichons, thinly sliced lengthwise
2T toum, plus more for dipping
Kosher salt
Divide the cheese between the two slices of bread. Shingle the cornichons in one even layer on one side. Carefully close the sandwich. Evenly spread a generous tablespoon of toum on one side of the sandwich.
In a medium heated skillet, place the sandwich, toum-side down. Press the sandwich firmly with a spatula to compress. Cook over medium-low until lightly golden underneath, 5 to 6 minutes.
Spread another generous tablespoon of toum on the top side of the bread, then flip the sandwich and press firmly. Cook until bread is lightly golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes, then flip back over. Since toum is made of mostly garlic, it burns easily. Take your time, reducing the heat to low, flipping and pressing the sandwich often to ensure that the cheese melts evenly and the bread doesn’t burn, about 3 more minutes. Lightly season both sides with salt and serve immediately, with a side of toum for dipping.
OMG! My mouth is watering!
Which reminds me of this terrific sign I saw at the 5 April Hands Off protest:
OMG
GOP
WTF
I took the day off from oldster care on Saturday so I could participate in the HANDS OFF protests. Am I glad I did. Here in Santa Cruz, roughly 5000 people attended! Just the boost we all need and the images we need the rest of the world to see. Americans are not sitting down. Americans do not agree.
Also, go to CHOOSEDEMOCRACY.US and click on stop the administrative coup. You will find ways to get involved. No one is coming to save us.
No Stanley this week, he’s home, living large with the neighbors. But this little man was my fav at the protest:
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Tell your people you love them, and take care of your skin!