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]

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]

This has not been my experience at all. Did she have anything in writing? There are usually no surprises in life. If someone lives a fulfilled life, or as kind and considerate as possible, they're not afraid to die of old age. We, people, know when the death is near just like all other animals. But with people who have left behind broken relationships, have done a lot of damage to others... they don't want to let it go. Perhaps they hope they can salvage something, perhaps they want to do some more damage... difficult to say. There've been studies that before death, people mostly say one of four things. Two of them are in the theme of "I love you" or "Do you love me?". It's not difficult to imagine which type of person would say what. Another frequent one is "I'm sorry". As to the PP about throwing abortion in the face of adult kids... you know there's euthanasia, right?[/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