Aging Parents

by Gene Shelburne

Can you think of anything more painful than some of the decisions people have to make on behalf of their aging parents?

News came via e-mail today that the dear, sweet mother of a longtime friend has been hospitalized with a stroke. My heart aches for my friend, because I know that her father already requires close care. Now both of her parents probably will, and she lives hundreds of miles from their front door.

This will be one of the hardest weeks of my friend’s life. I assured her that our prayers would be with her and her siblings as they make the necessary adjustments to provide their parents proper care.

But my friend is not alone in bearing this pain. In the year before I wrote these words, my brothers and my sister wept to see our always-competent father have to surrender his freedom to ramble across Texas in the family chariot. He made the adjustment gracefully, but we could see how much this new restriction hurt him. For 86 years he rambled literally all over the world, but his world now was shrinking. Partly at our insistence.

“The scary thing,” I told my friend as she prepared to fly to her mother’s bedside, “is that the next decisions like this will be made by our children as they wrestle with the very same heart-versus-head issues about how to take care of us when our minds or bodies fail.”

I don’t like to think about that. Not because of how those decisions will affect me, but because of what they will cost my kids in time and turmoil and tears.

My stepmother turned 90 not long before I sat down to write this essay. In the days before that birthday she was in and out of the hospital in Houston. That’s 600 miles from my door. “If you need my help,” I told my father, “I’ll come at once.” But both of us knew that he might need me more in the weeks ahead. So by common consent I stayed at work here at home. But I didn’t feel good about that.

Do we ever feel good about decisions we have to make for aging parents? The options open to us are seldom good ones. We find ourselves wanting to check, “None of the above.”

Caring for aging parents is never fun. But no promise of God is truer than his assurance that if we honor our fathers and mothers, it will be well with us.