Reply to How to deal with elderly parents?

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "How to deal with elderly parents? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You all reap what you sow.

All of you disrespecting your elderly parents, not helping or caring for them, your children are watching and learning.  Good luck[/quote]

You reap what you sow is right. It goes both ways. Honestly, I'm not worried about my kids at all as I don't expect them to arrange their lives around me. First, I'll plan for my old age, it's not a surprise when it comes. Second, I'm fine with getting old and understanding that I'll die. Third, I've lived my life in a way that if I die tomorrow, I'm at peace with it. With problem parents usually none of these points are there, in addition to having been nasty parents in the first place. So they'll reap what they sow. Interestingly, the problem parents are the ones that are very much afraid to die. [/quote]

I think a lot of us plan for this but life happens. Especially anything involving cognitive decline. It can be hard to recognize and people can and do change their minds. My mother always insisted she wouldn’t want any kind of life support or similar interventions. Well when the time came, she did. And selfishly I’m glad of that because we eked out another couple of years together. But there’s no doubt it was a profound change from what she intended when I was a kid and a young adult. I asked her once in her last year if she felt the quality of life - wheelchair-bound, assisted living, incontinent - was worth it. She said it was. It looked awful to me, especially remembering how fiercely independent she’d always been. I can only assume her mental decline played a role in her feeling it was a reasonable quality of life. But it was still her life and she wanted to live it. I respect that. I don’t think most of us can really know how we’ll choose. Future us may be quite different from current us. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics