So you want to read a very captivating story of aging parents written by a loving son? It transcends decades and generations and has lessons we can file away for consideration still today. Try this wonderful, caring piece that was sent to me by a friend, written by Michael Gartner, newspaper editor and former president of NBC News…

My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.

He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
“Oh, baloney!” she said. “He hit a horse.”

“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman, would take the streetcar to work and my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.

It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother.

So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.

(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.

If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”

“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre..

“No left turns,” he said.

“What?” I asked

“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic..

As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”

“What?” I said again.

“No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support.

“No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”
But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.

“Loses count?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”

I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.

“No,” he said ” If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.

She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.

They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.

“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: “I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet”

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life, Or because he quit taking left turns.

Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you right. Forget about the ones who don’t. Believe everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it and if it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.

So just consider how much more difficult it is for most older parents and other loved ones to read the small type. And sometimes even the not-so-small type.

Try an easy and inexpensive way to help them read more easily: give them their very own, personal magnifying glass. They now come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some have little light bulbs built in to provide added illumination. Some are the size of a sheet of paper and just as thin, helping see a whole page better at once.

That aging loved one likely will resist, but you need to persist. Make it non-threatening; make it an experiment just to try out what a magnifying glass might do. The results should amaze everyone.

Have you tried this? How did it go?

So what I’ve learned and hear from very many others across the country is that all of us who’ve been involved in caring for aging parents and other elderly loved ones need to ensure we’re okay.

Being okay is more than just saying it or thinking it.

Chances are, we’re actually not okay at all, but we simply don’t know what to look for to guide us. Especially if we’re spending more than 10 hours weekly looking after aging parents while keeping a full time job, helping our kids, keeping the house in good condition, and doing a host of other things al taking even more time.

Here are seven key questions to ask your self:
1. Am I getting a good night’s sleep most of the time, or am I tossing and turning, waking up in the middle of the night, tired in the morning more often than not?
2. Am I more easily irritated by others than I was two years ago?
3. Am I finding less time for personal quiet time?
4. Am I getting less exercise than I used to?
5. Am I using more ‘crutches’ to help me get by?
6. Am I having headaches more frequently now than two years ago?
7. Am I involved in more tense situations with my spouse/partner than I used to be?

If you answered ‘yes’ to at least four of them, it might be time to see your family physician to discuss the situation.

Caring actively for aging parents and other loved ones is a magnificent thing to do. But it carries a cost, regardless of how strong, assured, grounded, mature, and self-sufficient we think we are. So please self-care first so you can care about and for all of your loved ones.

Welcome to 2012. A new year, possibly bringing new responsibilities with aging parents and other loved ones, or most likely more involvement with existing support activities.

For this New Year, we at My Care Journey wish you:

• Good personal health in order to shoulder the demands on your time, energy, understanding, patience, and dedication.
• A collection of loving experiences with those aging loved ones that you’ll be able to share with them and hold onto and relive forever.
• Family and friends who are understanding and supportive of the challenges you face.
• Healthcare professionals who will give your older parents the kind of thoughtful attention and help they really need.
• The ability to do your best and the confidence to know you are.

We look forward to our continuing dialogue on the many aspects of eldercare that’s happening here. And thanks for your ongoing interest and engagement.

So when you’re planning for the festive season, remember that older parents and other aging loved ones often have different needs than our children or we do.

Because they’re such an important part of our sense of family and the holidays, we take for granted that our older family members can be as fully involved as we’d like. The fact is, elderly family members may be lacking the stamina we’d wish they had.

That’s why it’s so important to plan all holiday events to ensure aging loved ones can enjoy them fully and that we can have the pleasure of their company.

Here are five steps for you to consider and apply in order to assure elder enjoyment at your family events this holiday season.

1. Reduce ‘wait time’. You can spend a lot of family wait time while meals are being prepared or people are dressing, or getting to a religious ceremony early in order to have good seating. But these are actually tiring times for the elderly. Help them by planning the latest time you can bring them to the event. That way, they don’t have to spend tiring ‘wait time’ doing nothing.

2. Build in ‘down time’. Make sure there’s at least half an hour or hour of rest time between events so your elderly parents can relax and perhaps catch a catnap or at least just have some personal quiet time. Their batteries run down faster now, and some recharge time becomes important.

3. Make meals more manageable. The more courses and the longer time a full meal takes, the more agitated little kids become… and the more aggravated older people become. Elderly parents will find long, drawn out meals fatiguing, even if they pretend to be enjoying themselves. So plan meals to be shorter, or plan strategies to respectfully give them options during a drawn out dinner so they’ll have some rest time.

4. Smart wrap for gift giving. What can be an issue for the elderly is the challenge of opening gifts that are tightly taped and tied with lots of ribbons. With reduced dexterity and maybe some arthritis, older parents and other aging loved ones can be stymied by some of the packages we present. Make it easier—and eliminate the embarrassment of being unable to open a package—by either wrapping their gifts much more loosely, or better yet, by putting them into attractive gift bags, covered with colourful issue paper.

5. Slow down and speak up. The elderly tend to process less quickly and don’t hear as well as once ago. To help them get the most out of your holiday events, slow down how fast you talk or do things, and speak more slowly and louder. Be sure to watch their reactions and body language very carefully for clues about how well they’re staying with you in terms of what’s being done and said.

And it’s also important to consider that for an elderly person who has lost a loved one, this is an especially difficult time of year. The loss, and the memories that inevitably freely flow especially during religious festivities, combine to create a level of personal hurt and pain we often don’t understand or respect to the extent we could and should.

The point, though, is that shared holidays are special.

When we consciously plan to meet the oft-unexpressed needs of our elderly family members, we’re ensuring they’ll be active participants in our holiday events. And we’ll know that their engagement is satisfying to them,
and by extension, to every person in the family.

It’s interesting to note that the past couple of years there have been ever more frequent newspaper stories and television news coverage about ‘elder abuse’. It’s akin to how child abuse became a mainstream issue about a dozen years ago: some people complained about it and media recognized the issue and took up the cause
Read More

So a federal government report issued late last week exposed yet more about the horrible issue of elder abuse. The report’s authors estimate some 400,000 seniors are abused across Canada each year.

That’s an astounding and terrifying statistic. What can we all do to curb this? We managed to address and more effectively deal with child and spousal abuse; what do we have to do to protect vulnerable aging parents and other loved ones?

And think about how many ways elder abuse is inflicted. How many ways come to your mind when you think about it?

I’ll have more on this soon when we post here my next column in Hospital News. It takes a much more in-depth look at the three core kinds of elder abuse: financial, emotional, and physical.

So were well into fall now, the warm days are gone, we’ve turned the clocks back, and the nights are cooler.

We all change over our wardrobes, putting the sweaters up front, the corduroy slacks close at hand, and dig out the boots, hats and gloves.

But let’s not forget to help our aging parents and other elderly loved ones do the same. Don’t assume it will happen without your asking, or maybe even your help.

Way too often, many elderly people just don’t think about what kind of preparations are needed for seasonal weather changes, or sometimes, with the onset of diminishing cognitive skills or any form of dementia, there’s a mental disconnect regarding what to do and why, and sometimes how to do it.

That’s why during seasonal changeover times it’s good to ask, check, help in terms of wardrobe changeovers. Have you done that?

So you may not believe flu shots make a difference, or you may get the shot one year but not another. But if you have aging parents and other elderly loved ones, do them a favor: get the flu shot.

Ask your family physician or any health care professional about the importance of limiting the risk to the elderly that getting a flu shot gives. No question: given their ages and often their conditions, they’re more vulnerable to catching a bad cold or flu from someone who has been infected.

That’s why as added protection for them, get a flu shot for you. Reduce the risk. And maybe even help yourself.

Will you go get a flu shot, knowing it can help keep aging parents and other loved ones less risk?

My parents were the product of another age: They lived after the Great War, through the depression and the Second World War. So when it came to their financial values, fears and safety zones, they were highly conservative and outright secretive.

As they moved well into retirement mode and their early 80s, it was clear they were declining in various ways and at different rates, both physically and cognitively. They looked at their financial and legal affairs as personal and private, marginalizing even me, their trusted only child. My father told me I was the executor of their wills, yet the originals and copies were in their safety deposit box, to which I had no access.

It took a number of very careful conversations with my father (who was the master of the purse) to edge him toward thinking about letting me have a role in their financial well-being. I wanted him to understand that I needed to know their wishes in order to do the best things for him and my mother. We talked about how I could help make sure their bills were paid on time, address any other financial concerns and oversee their finances in case one of them felt ill (by having signing authority at the bank and access to the safety deposit box). We also talked about them giving me power of attorney rights.

Once my father got comfortable with the role I was asking to assume and why, and what the benefits and safeguards were for them, he was ready to commit to sharing access to their finances. He and I went to their bank; we signed forms allowing me to cosign for access to all of their accounts and the safety deposit box. He also had power of attorney documents prepared and signed.

From then until he was well into his 90s, we made weekly visits to the bank and I helped him with all transactions. When he was no longer well enough to come with me, I was entrusted to do it all for them on my own. Mind you, I was 50 years old by then.

Even though it’s uncomfortable having these difficult conversations with aging parents, I would encourage others to press to have those talks, as well as to forge agreements, and build plans and databases of personal information. This can only help both them and you, and allow everyone to explore and understand any financial fears, needs and wishes.

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