Mom and Dad and my Mother

I am hoping that now that summer and its' busyness are over, that things will return to a more normal schedule.

As some of you know, my father-in-law passed away Sept 18 to be followed shortly by my mother-in-law on Oct 7. This has been a very stressful time for our whole family. It is sad that they are gone, yet we know that their lives had become so painful and difficult. It is a conflict that all children face with elderly and ill parents. You want to keep them around as long as possible, yet you also want their suffering to be over with. Both lead to guilt feeling. You are caught either way in feeling like an uncaring offspring.

My own mother has been in a care facility for almost three years. She has Parkinson's Disease. I truly hope that her misery can be over soon. She is so debilitated by this horrid disease that she can not even roll over in bed by herself. She is in a diaper, can not feed herself and suffers from dementia part of the time. A good day is when she knows who I am and can tell me she loves me when I tell her I lover her. We have been able to increase her quality of life somewhat by removing all the antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs which had turned her into a zombie.

Where am I going with all this??? Here it is, if you have an elderly parent do not let the medical community destroy the quality of what little time they have left. If someone is in the nursing home of course they are highly likely to be depressed and often anxious. That does not mean they have to be drugged into a semi-comatose state. It took my mother about a year to get all of the drugs out of her system and thinking again. While she will never "get better" she at least knows when her children, family and friends have been visit and can acknowledge us.