Page 58 - Aging Parents - FDCCPublications

PATIENCE, PLANNING AND SUPPORT: REFLECTIONS ON DEALING WITH AGING FAMILY MEMBERS
mph on my way to visit clients in rural Manitoba. In short, I trusted my dad’s driving skills without question based on the lessons learned at his knee.
As parents, we worked full-time, and the girls were generally in summer camp during the day. My parents wanted to visit my dad’s family in his hometown, a drive that was about an hour and a half out of the city. We all agreed it would be a nice adventure away from day camp for the granddaughters. Dad had flown into Toronto to stay briefly with us once before when we lived in an apartment with only one child. He was then attending to the details of his younger sister’s sudden passing and funeral, which we attended in separate cars. Returning from the roughly 11⁄2 hour drive to his hometown, he noticed the significant changes to the highway exits and layout since his last visit a decade or so before.
Remembering this, and before leaving for work on the morning of their adventure with granddaughters in tow,
I reminded him, but otherwise, he had no concerns or worries. When I arrived home that evening, all seemed fine. I asked our eldest daughter about the trip. She cheerfully replied that grandpa got lost a few times on the way home, amongst other details. I assumed from this that perhaps he had ignored or forgotten my caution about the changes to the highway layout and so thought nothing more of it... until further details came out about just what my daughter had meant about getting lost.
As it turns out, the problem was not on the highway or in his hometown, both of which he seemed fine navigating.9 Instead, it was in our neighborhood where he got “lost.” Since the street we lived on was only two blocks long in a section of old Toronto laid out on a grid pattern, there is not much to mystify an out-of-town driver, and certainly
not one with my dad’s driving experience. As later relayed to me, it was, in fact, my eldest daughter who eventually guided grandpa back to the house. This was, Mom later told me, after dad had at least twice driven past our marked and signed street.
This was before the days of Google maps or other
navigation software – and so mom, who relied on dad to do the driving, was quite panicked but did her best not to show it to the girls. To hear it from my eldest, this was no big deal – just another part of the adventure – but Mom had quiet discussions with my then-spouse, who became more than
a little concerned about how Mom was describing Dad’s behavior. I was encouraged to “go for a walk” with Mom in the strongest possible terms.
Pausing here, readers may wonder why I did not pick up
on anything unusual much sooner – why my mom did not alert me to the markedly different behavior, etc. Indeed, if I knew my parents well, I’d have seen the signs earlier, asked questions earlier, etc. I later wracked my brain to remember if I had seen or should have seen any earlier warning signs from our all too infrequent family trips. But the truth is, I was not in any position to “see” or appreciate the situation firsthand with that distance.
Nor was his conduct yet troubling enough locally for my older brother to notice or alert me. My brother lived in
the same town on Vancouver Island. Still, he often worked either in the Alberta oil patch as a field inspector or abroad as a safety officer on an oil rig in the Persian Gulf – which made raising his daughter as a single parent a challenge. My parents, therefore, spent a lot of their time helping
with that once they moved out. If anything, with his work commitments, my brother was likely less informed than me, even with an address much closer to my parents.
But the most important bit of information to share and for readers to understand is that I relied mainly on my parents to let me know how they were doing. And we must recognize and account for the fact that we all do this. Our parents, after all, have historically been the ones who told us what to do, how to do it, etc. In this context, our natural inclination is to assume they can take care of themselves unless they tell us otherwise. Now, about that walk with my mom:
It took some doing, and I resorted to “turning on” my well- honed litigator skills to tease out the story from the “witness” – my mom. What started as her complaining about the state
9 For those not familiar, the tendency in dementia patients is an ability to retrieve with sometimes remarkable clarity longer term memories while having more difficulty with short term memories.
53