What is it about living with the aged that makes it so hard? Is it the constant repetition? The view of what's coming up ahead for oneself? The loss of freedom, of independence, hard won after years of raising children? I often hear aging - and in particular, increasing levels of cognitive impairment - described as something like a recurrence of childhood. But my close-up observation of the past 17 months suggests nothing of the sort. Children possess a constantly growing intelligence and driving curiosity. Every day, among the endless aggravations and burdens of parenting you're rewarded by the energy and imagination and frequently verbalized discoveries of your children. The reverse is not at all the same. The shutting down of imagination, the loss of the ability to reason, and the decay of memory is simultaneously saddening, frustrating and boring. There are never breakthroughs, only breakdowns.
My mother-in-law, a sweet natured, highly intelligent, but hopelessly passive and emotionally dessicated woman, was always the most singularly boring person I have ever known. Her interests have never extended much farther than monitoring the activities of her family, either those related by blood or by law, and by extension the families of others. Though she loved to watch movies and read novels, she never had anything to say about them. (I use the past tense because these activities have become rote. She still likes to watch movies, but invariably finds them "a little too confusing" and though she still reads, she retains almost nothing, the words seeming to pass into, through, and beyond her consciousness as soon as her eyes scan them.) A member of a significant and far-flung Argentine family, she has traveled the world, but only to visit relatives, never to experience a different culture or environment. She was never interested in trying new things and lived for 40 years in the same house without ever getting to know any neighbor who did not come knocking at her door to seek her out. At 90, she has become emphatically more of the same.
While my wife works her 60 hours plus per week job, I, as the under-employed, home-based spouse have picked up many of the day-to-day management issues. I contend with the slow, machine-like repetitiveness of her schedule. The quirky, anti-social, hermit-like habits developed over 40 years of living as a divorced single. The daily dinners, with the identical salad she arduously prepares each evening, carefully peeling the celery, de-seeding the tomatoes, de-veining the lettuce, meticulously removing all texture from the ingredients. Dinner with the three places she sets at the table (though my wife never joins us, always working until 9 or later) and the dinner I cook. At least 450 dinners that I have cooked, and eaten with her (more dinners in this year and half than my wife and I have shared in more than six years), with the almost identical conversation ("Have you heard from the kids?") There is the five to seven hours of television each day, consisting of mind-numbingly, moronic "reality" and game shows (who knew that there were so many "Judge" shows? Has Pat Sajak always been so patently bored?) Hearing them in the next room as I try to work, I find it making me depressed about the whole future of Western civilization.
My father followed a similar course, receding gradually into a land that consisted of endlessly unique and uninterpretable moments with no remembered progenitors and no known outcomes. But I did not live with him. I did not experience this for hour after hour each day. When I stayed with him for a week a few months before his death in 2006, it was shocking how vacant his personality had become, only glimmering through the closed door of his dementia at rare, surprising, and surprisingly delightful moments. Watching this process unfold at close range over an extended period with my Mother-in-Law has removed the shock and replaced it with unwarranted frustration, anger, depression, and occasionally pity. I wonder if my fixation on her condition is an escape from the discomfort of my own hapless ineptitude at re-establishing my working life in a new(ish) place, my own inability to break out of my current predicament - that she looks like what I see myself becoming?
Though always notably affectless (at least notable to someone like me, raised by a highly emotive Italian mother) she was always kind, always gentle and always self-sacrificing to a fault. To a real fault. During our children's elementary school days, her semi-annual visits were rare breaks for us, when she took over the cooking, child-care, and much of the cleaning duties. As the years passed, and this help wasn't really needed anymore, she was unable to stop, and it became clear that this "help" was far more important to her than to us. When she moved in with us after a fall that left her with a fractured pelvis, she attempted to resume this routine as soon as she was able to walk, but by this time, the constant straightening and cleaning had become a fixation that was both irksome (since the "straightening" usually resulted in the chaotic misplacement of all sorts of things, and the cleaning didn't clean) and disturbing. Eventually it became clear that she needed to move. We rationalized our decision with the perfectly defensible argument that if she did not move into an independent housing situation (where the costs for her care would be stable from this point on, through assisted living and eventually to nursing care) while she was still able to manage, more-or-less, on her own, she would not be able to afford these more intensive care situations when the time came. And this is absolutely true - and it is care that we cannot afford or provide ourselves. But the truth is that my wife and I were going slowly mad. Our privacy was completely gone, our social events always included this person who was not so much a friend as the parent we moved out of the house to get away from 40 years ago. Someone who was always there, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It was small of us, maybe unfeeling. But it was also a situation that we had tried for years to avoid, and one that was created largely by her unwillingness to make any plans for her infirmity when she was still capable of making them - despite the repeated entreaties of her children and friends.
This weekend she moved into an independent living facility. Her new apartment is sunny, modern, and far more luxurious than the beloved house she left behind in California, and it is filled with the furniture and pictures from her house that were stored in our basement until now. But I know that she would rather be here with us, sitting in her enormous, electric recliner in our den, part of our "family", happily oblivious of the stress she has introduced. I feel like a shit. But maybe I will drink less now. Maybe I will work more now. Maybe I will become different and not become her.
