cs humming, navigates the world with the ease of a Garmin, and picks up after himself without being asked.","markups":[{"type":2,"start":172,"end":181}]},{"name":"66ea","type":1,"text":"But he dazzles me most when he offers his arm to his still-mobile but wobbly father and steers him through the ordinary obstacles in a parking lot and into a restaurant. The pair of them process in a slow march that gives moment to the quotidien and elicits approving glances and goo-ey smiles from strangers.","markups":[]},{"name":"6af9","type":1,"text":"Charlie takes his dad to lunch at least once a week, to get him off the rez, as he calls the independent-living residence where William has lived since he gave up his car keys and moved to Dallas 2 ½ years ago. Until then, he had spent long hours on the screened-in back porch of his lake house in the Texas Hill County, smoking a pipe and watching blue herons land and take off from his deck. As hard as it was to give up the sweet pleasures of home, failing eyesight and loneliness prevailed.","markups":[{"type":2,"start":68,"end":75}]},{"name":"0e8d","type":1,"text":"Since my husband took on dad duty, I’ve become aware of how many others I know who, in their 50s, 60s and 70s, have set aside their own retirement plans to tend the long-lived greatest generation. These adult children research senior living facilities, move their parents closer, or even return to their childhood homes to care for frail moms and dads. Now, at social gatherings with my peers, there’s a lot less talk about work and children…and a lot more about the difficulties of parenting a parent.","markups":[]},{"name":"2c17","type":1,"text":"Because my father-in-law is a good-natured gentleman, with the optimism and humor that partly explains his longevity, the time Charlie spends with his dad ranges from mildly entertaining to mostly boring. They go to the barbershop and to the grocery store for coffee, ice cream, and Hershey’s Miniatures. Occasionally, they find a bench at White Rock Lake and smoke a companionable pipe. They’ve inspected a B-17 bomber and a Navy Hellcat at a local airshow. And, they spent a recent morning stuffing envelopes to benefit an area dog shelter.","markups":[]},{"name":"42e2","type":1,"text":"For Charlie, the most difficult part of tending his father is the waiting. Although his father is remarkably healthy for a man almost a century old, Charlie has served some hard time in waiting rooms, particularly the dentist’s. And because going to the doctor is (as my own dad says) a significant part of a senior’s social life, William never passes up an opportunity to have an expert examine him. That kind of official waiting allows my antsy husband time to read. What makes him far more itchy is the meal-time wait; that is, the lapse between Charlie finishing his meal and his cud-chewing pater finally leaning back from his plate. Conversation is no good. William once impressed the ladies in his circle by being “a good listener.” Now, he may be listening, but he rarely hears a full sentence that doesn’t require a louder, more emphatic repetition, awkward in a public place. (“IS THAT CHICKEN GOOD?” I SAID, “HOW’S YOUR CHICKEN?” “NO, I WAS WONDERING IF YOU LIKE YOUR CHICKEN.”) And so, they silently sit on, Charlie working on the virtue of patience, and his dad, laboring over his chicken strips.","markups":[]},{"name":"ce4b","type":1,"text":"It could be so much worse, Charlie admits. It could be his mother. William thoughtfully considered his options and moved to Dallas when he could no longer live alone, sparing Charlie the agony of speeding down I-35 several times a month to pay the bills, run errands, mow the acre of lawn, and strap on the tool belt. My mother-in-law, on the other hand, would have stayed in place, isolated and angry, unable to keep up with things but unwilling to ask for help. When she died at 87, my husband breathed a shameful little sigh of relief, knowing the death order had gone his way.","markups":[]},{"name":"6693","type":1,"text":"Are mothers more difficult? Or are there simply more of them? One friend who devoted many years to her mother’s needs has painfully admitted that, by the time her mom died, any grief she might have felt was overshadowed by relief that her own suffering was over.","markups":[]},{"name":"c2ca","type":1,"text":"Another friend flies to Dallas four times a year to help her 93-year-old father, and like my husband, is relieved that it’s not her mother. She calls the quarterly trips to visit easy-going dad her senior vacays. “My dad has the natural ability to go with the flow,” she says. Her mother, on the other hand, was more demanding and needed to be the center of attention. “Had she lived, she would have been a lot harder to deal with than my dad.”","markups":[{"type":2,"start":198,"end":212}]},{"name":"6891","type":1,"text":"In my own family, it’s my twin brother who watches out for our 83-year-old mother, a woman whose large personality only grew larger as she physically shrank, when poor health isolated her indoors, dependent on an oxygen concentrator for every breath. Michael lives 20 miles from her; her apartment is on his way home from work. He does her Krogering on Thursday nights, picks up her prescriptions, opens jars, files her taxes: he’s the honey on her honey-do list. I’ve seen him meticulously approach a small repair well within his realm of expertise and, with my hovering mother offering blow-by-blow instructions, he will manage to complete the job without stroking out.","markups":[]},{"name":"f3a2","type":1,"text":"Too often, Michael arrives at Mom’s door to find her querulous, and there’s no one there to block her punches. Almost 1,000 miles away, I email my mother daily, and I talk to her on the phone an hour every Sunday morning. I fly in two or three times a year. But for me, her bad moods and poisonous complaints are mitigated by distance; my brother’s proximity offers no such protection.","markups":[]},{"name":"6463","type":1,"text":"My heart aches for my mild-mannered twin, but I know he’s temperamentally better suited for tending our aging parent. Dryly funny, he can disarm her with a crack. They talk current events without drawing weapons. He loves her cakes and pies, and she will crawl from her sickbed to make one for him. He can do it justice, too. When Mom’s down in the dumps, he’ll invite her to talk about her childhood in Tennessee, or let her tell him all about Dancing With the Stars or how much she loathes the Kardashians.","markups":[{"type":2,"start":445,"end":467}]},{"name":"d1f5","type":1,"text":"My brother wisely knows when to remain silent. When Mom launches into a story she’s told dozens of times, Michael allows her to tell it. Even as a kid, my brother could tune out what didn’t interest him: he was our family’s deep thinker, and it excused his poor memory. The absent-minded professor, my mother called him. He once famously left our little sister alone in the house, having forgotten he was babysitting her. I’ve sometimes wondered if there’s some lovely place he goes to in his head, some Zen garden where the stories of my mother’s unhappiness cannot find him.","markups":[]},{"name":"3185","type":1,"text":"Unhappily, my sister and I both engage with our mother; we armor up and fight back. When she tells that same old story, we roll our eyes and tell her we’ve heard it before. We are too much like her, maybe. After a recent visit, I called Mom from the airport before my plane departed, feeling the usual weight of guilt for my impatience, for what I’d said in anger. When she picked up the phone, her first words were, “I’m sorry for anything I said that upset you.” I said, “Yeah, me too.”","markups":[]},{"name":"a1c4","type":1,"text":"When I get home to Dallas, I vow to do better. I witness Charlie and his dad bent over a mutual task, one my husband could more easily do alone, and I aspire to that brand of generosity. And I recall the sight of my brother carrying my mother’s enormous purse around Walmart, the one I always tell her to leave at home because it’s too much to juggle with a walker and an oxygen tank when all she needs is a credit card…and I promise myself I’ll be more tolerant next time.","markups":[]},{"name":"cede","type":1,"text":"My husband and my brother are mature men who’ve worked hard all their lives, raised children, loved their dogs, and changed tires in the rain. In my head is the expectation that daughters take care of their sick and aging parents; in my life, the caregivers are the best men I know.","markups":[]}],"sections":[{"name":"4de3","startIndex":0}]},"postDisplay":{"coverless":true}},"virtuals":{"statusForCollection":"","createdAtRelative":"6 months ago","updatedAtRelative":"2 months ago","acceptedAtRelative":"","createdAtEnglish":"February 26, 2015","updatedAtEnglish":"July 11, 2015","acceptedAtEnglish":"","firstPublishedAtEnglish":"February 26, 2015","latestPublishedAtEnglish":"July 11, 2015","allowNotes":true,"languageTier":1,"snippet":"There’s no one I admire more than my husband, and there’s nothing more admirable about him than the way he cares for his 98-year-old father…","previewImage":{"imageId":"","filter":"","backgroundSize":"","originalWidth":0,"originalHeight":0,"strategy":"resample","height":0,"width":0},"wordCount":1510,"imageCount":1,"readingTime":5.89811320754717,"subtitle":"There’s no one I admire more than my husband, and there’s nothing more admirable about him than the way he cares for his 98-year-old father…","publishedInCount":0,"usersBySocialRecommends":[],"notesBySocialRecommends":[],"proposedAtRelative":"","latestPublishedAtAbbreviated":"Jul 11","firstPublishedAtAbbreviated":"Feb 26","emailSnippet":", whom he calls Daddy, in the manner of Texas men of a certain vintage. ¶\n\nAt 74, Charlie is a snowy-haired professor emeritus, the author of 11 books, grandfather of three, a man who rides his bike to yoga class, speaks Spanish, makes a terrific bolognese, and always answers his phone as if he’s been waiting for YOU to call. As a husband, he can’t be beat: he keeps our electronics humming, navigates the world with the ease of a Garmin, and picks up after himself without being asked.","recommends":3,"featuredRecommendNoteId":"","socialRecommends":[],"isBookmarked":false,"tags":[{"slug":"caregiving","name":"Caregiving","type":"Tag"},{"slug":"family","name":"Family","type":"Tag"},{"slug":"seniors","name":"Seniors","type":"Tag"}],"socialRecommendsCount":0,"responsesCreatedCount":0,"proposedAt":0},"coverless":true,"slug":"caregivers","translationSourcePostId":"","translationSourceCreatorId":"","isApprovedTranslation":false,"inResponseToPostId":"","inResponseToRemovedAt":0,"isTitleSynthesized":false,"allowResponses":true,"importedUrl":"","importedPublishedAt":0,"visibility":0,"isViewed":false,"uniqueSlug":"caregivers-64ae8bb142bf","previewContent":{"bodyModel":{"paragraphs":[{"name":"14a1","type":3,"text":"Caregivers","markups":[],"alignment":1},{"name":"b6f7","type":1,"text":""},{"name":"175c","type":1,"text":"There’s no one I admire more than my husband, and there’s nothing more admirable about him than the way he cares for his 98-year-old father, whom he calls Daddy, in the manner of Texas men of a certain vintage.","markups":[],"alignment":1},{"name":"74f7","type":1,"text":"At 74, Charlie is a snowy-haired professor emeritus, the author of 11 books, grandfather of three, a man who rides his bike to yoga class, speaks Spanish…","markups":[],"alignment":1}],"sections":[{"startIndex":0}]},"isFullContent":false},"license":0,"inResponseToMediaResourceId":"","canonicalUrl":"https://medium.com/@marciasmith/caregivers-64ae8bb142bf","approvedHomeCollectionId":"","newsletterId":"","type":"Post","_isPopulated":true},"collaborators":[],"collectionUserRelations":[],"mode":null,"references":{"User":{"ceb382364d93":{"userId":"ceb382364d93","name":"Marcia Smith","username":"marciasmith","createdAt":1419356104689,"lastPostCreatedAt":1436472339449,"imageId":"0*cw7BJX0UTDCij5GI.jpg","backgroundImageId":"","bio":"Former features writer/columnist at the Dallas Times Herald and English teacher at Dallas’s arts magnet high school, where she did not teach Norah Jones.","twitterScreenName":"","social":{"userId":"lo_fa698c549e40","targetUserId":"ceb382364d93","type":"Social"},"facebookAccountId":"1387998555","type":"User"}},"Social":{"ceb382364d93":{"userId":"lo_fa698c549e40","targetUserId":"ceb382364d93","type":"Social"}}}}}
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