Assisted Living, here we come.

My folks are slowing down.

At their ages (soon to be 92 and 93), I guess they’ve earned that privilege.

Until recently, they have managed pretty well to live independently, but last week I made the call to see if we couldn’t get them into ‘assisted living’ as soon as possible.

Over the last several years, my parents have functioned fairly adequately with a mutually dependent, symbiotic relationship.

While my mom has had her share of physical limitations and challenges, she has remained fairly sharp mentally. She has occupied herself with many of the ‘details’ of their lives: keeping track of appointments, balancing the checkbook, etc.

My dad has suffered from memory loss, and was diagnosed with ‘early stage Alzheimer’s’ a couple of years ago. In spite of this, until recently he has been relatively clear mentally and very good physically.

So, the way the relationship has worked, is dad has been doing the physical ‘heavy lifting’, and mom has been telling him ‘what to lift’ and ‘where to set it down’. While that ‘symbiotic’ relationship has been working in the past, the future seems a little more problematic.

Dad’s Alzheimer’s seems to be taking a firmer grip on his cognitive skills and he appears more mixed up, more often and with a deeper level of confusion. I know it is not going to go away. And mom’s formerly clear thinking also seems to be becoming a little more muddy. She can’t hear well at all, so its difficult to determine how much of her ‘muddy thinking’ is mis-communication due to her not hearing, and how much is just otherwise muddy.

An indication of Mom’s lapse in ‘sharpness’ has been her ongoing self-delusion that Publisher’s Clearing House is getting close to sending her a check for “millions”. Her expectations for her ‘big payday’ have been so real to her that she has obsessed about out how to divvy-up that money between her kids, grandkids and great-grandkids.

My only brother lives in Atlanta, so we each live about 1000 miles away from our parents. And, as life has worked out, none of the grandkids live any closer to my folks than my brother and I do. Any of us who would want to help have difficulty due to the distances involved.

So, we’re working at getting them set up in assisted living. It will be a new stage for them and for us, but I’ve finally recognized that this season of their lives has arrived.