Fifty-Degree Morning

In January I said that there was nothing like a windy, five-degree morning to make a still, ten-degree morning feel tropical by comparison.  Today, after two sunny, eighty-five degree days that reduced me to torpor, I really enjoyed a cloudy, fifty-degree morning.

My parents are 86 and 87.  They are falling a lot.  Right now my dad is recovering from a broken shoulder and my mom is recovering from a broken pelvis.  Right now they require 24 help in the house.  We had to encourage my mom to recognize the increasingly untenable situation they are in, living in a split-level home: stairs to the bedroom, stairs to the front-door, no shopping within walking distance.  Negotiating those stairs with the assistance of a home health care aide puts those aides in physical jeopardy.

So yesterday my mom calls me to say they will be moving to an assisted-living facility sooner rather than later.  And -- apparently because I am not steeling myself to make the argument that this is a necessary change -- this hits me really hard.  I don't really mind them giving up the house.  True, I barely remember any other place (they moved there when I was four) but they rearranged everything long ago.  The bedroom my brother and I shared no longer exists; it is an office for my parents' desks and computers.  My sister's bedroom had its walls knocked out; it is a loft for the living room.  Our playroom? The front two-thirds are an entryway, with the door to the house where the window used to be; the back third is part of the utility room, along with the original utility room and part of the original garage.

No, it's not the house.  It is my parents themselves.  For several years I have had to look closely to actually see their age and frailty instead of just habitually seeing the robust strength of their former selves.  But this?  This inability to even remain in their own house?  That is something new and very frightening.

It frightens me that I will have to visit them in some other kind of place.  It frightens me that their strength may be irrevocably past.  It frightens me that my grandson will only ever know them as elderly.  And, truthfully, it frightens me that this is my future, too.  How will I be able to live out of a vehicle if it is hard for me to stand, unsafe for me to drive, dangerous for me to walk?  Who will care for me?

Today is cloudy and still (1:30 pm) in the fifties, so my optimism is back and the world feels better.  But I need to be strong when it's in the nineties, too.  I am still capable in MY sixties.  Who can say what MY eighties and nineties will bring?