Pick up the phone. Write the letter. Make the drive. And soon.
Visiting relatives is not always easy, I’ll admit that, especially elderly relatives living in a care facility. What do you say? What can you do with them? Are you even allowed to visit? I try not to get up on a soap box and preach about the necessity of family involvement in the lives of elderly relatives, but it is so, so, SO important! Forget protecting them from fraud, or keeping an eye on the treatment they’re receiving, or being involved in the big decisions for a second, and let’s look at a couple examples that will (hopefully) be the motivation that you need to just visit for visiting sake.
The picture at the top is me with my beloved grandmother, Bestemor (Norwegian for ‘grandmother’), who passed away just recently. She was a whopping 92, still sharp as a tack, and the most organized person I’ve ever met (mostly to combat memory loss). She lived at an Independent Living Facility (commonly referred to as ‘IL’) in Eugene, and I live in Tualatin, so just about two hours north of her.
She loved the Oregon Ducks, especially Duck basketball, and we have a relative who is able to get free tickets for us. I told her that I was going to come and take her to a game, and she loved that idea! I kept meaning to do it, I swear I had the best of intentions, but you know how it is - life got in the way. One evening when I was talking with my parents they let me know that they didn’t think Bestemor was doing well, and that I should see her, and soon. They wanted me to use my experience in senior living (what little I had at this time) and see if she was still IL appropriate. My weekend plans cleared up, my parents had a day free, and so we loaded up and drove down. We spent a lovely Saturday with Bestemor, and she even agreed to take a picture with my dad and me – she didn’t want to, but I insisted on a picture of the three generations.
The next weekend, I received a very different phone call from my dad. Basically, Bestemor had gone to the hospital with some abdominal pain, which they thought was a urinary tract infection (also called a UTI, very common in the elderly), which turned out to be much, much more serious. I had seen her on a Saturday, and the next Sunday she went to the hospital and never left. She passed away on Tuesday, after all her kids and many of her grandkids were in to see her and say goodbye.
I still kick myself all the time for not taking the time to take her to a basketball game like I said I would. That will bother me for years, I know it. But you know what? I saw her the weekend before she died, and that was a huge blessing. What if plans had come up or something gotten in the way? I am so grateful for the opportunity I had to spend her last healthy weekend with her. I’m so glad I made the drive.
You don’t have to make the drive, necessarily. It depends, of course, on where you live and where your loved one lives, or whether or not it’s appropriate to visit. I have another example that I want to share. We had a woman living at our facility who had Alzheimer’s, and even when her son came to visit her, she would quickly forget that he had. She would complain, ‘I have no family in the area; no one ever comes to visit me. I’m all alone.’ Sidebar: She actually loved this fact. She would brag about the fact that she was alone and ‘making it on her own’ to other residents and staff all the time. But I digress. Anyways, her son came by every now and then, but his visits were few and far between, and didn’t leave a lasting impression in her demented mind.
What did leave an impression, however, were the cards and photos she had been mailed. In the pocket on her walker she carried around every single memento that she had received over the years, and she pulled them out to look at them multiple times a day. She loved to see that people had written her, and she read the cards to me multiple times. The visits didn’t do much, but the cards did - such a simple gesture that carried so much weight.
One of the saddest scenarios that I see are families that have broken or fractured relationships that wait until it’s too late to try and make amends. Once they see mom or dad really failing, they want to repair the damage from earlier life before they pass away and it’s too late. However, most of the time it’s unfortunately already too late. Once mom or dad has progressed along the dementia scale, they may not be able to replace old, hurtful memories with new, pleasant ones of your time together. Or they may transfix on brokenness from years ago and not be in a state of mind to move past it anymore. Even before they pass away, it can be too late, and I have seen firsthand children stuck with remorse for the rest of their lives because they harbored bitterness and didn’t make the effort to repair the relationship until they thought it was almost too late. And unfortunately, it already was.
It’s a busy world out there, and slowing down and finding time is difficult. But pick up the phone. Write the letter. Make the drive. Before you don’t have the option, and you wonder what possibly could have kept you from one simple basketball game.
