LJ Idol -- Season 7 -- Week Two: Deconstruction
Give me the keys, you're too old to drive. We are taking your license away because you hit another mailbox this week -- next time, it could be the neighbor on his bike...
You can live with Jim and Terry -- it won't be a problem. Oh, and by the way, I'll be selling the house and so you'll need to be out by the end of next month so we can get it on the market. We'll have a yard sale to get rid of the stuff you can't take with you...
Don't worry, it's just an assisted living home, nothing to worry about. We'll be by to visit once a week...
You spend your whole life growing, taking on more responsibilities, more knowledge, more experience until one day, before you know it, those responsibilities are taken from you and you're treated like a child.
When does that happen -- 60? 75? 95? When does the choice somehow move away from the individual to the family?
And when are the motives purely in the elderly's best interest? When do daughters, sons, nieces, and nephews start to see the inheritance as something tangible they can't wait to get vs. something their family members should use and spend to make his/her life more comfortable?
When do you start sentences with If Grandma makes it to Christmas vs. assuming she will be there?
And when does the loved one give up his/her life to go live with their mom, dad, grandmother, uncle, brother vs. putting them in a facility that will take every penny he/she has scrimped and saved for years and years to pay for care?
Why are there so many lonely people in Nursing homes sitting in wheelchairs, chin dropped, drooling with no one to hold their hand, smile, engage them in conversation?
When does the cycle of life hit that peak and start its downward spiral, where you start to decline vs. climb that hill of life and learning.
And how do you at 24, as you're starting that climb, deal with seeing your great-grandmother in this situation? To hear how she's been up every night this week crying out in pain because of her shoulder hurting -- or how the stories she starts telling that are just a little off and delirious-sounding?
How do you prepare for someone who has always been the strong, feisty, witty one is slowly leaving you and you are 500 miles away?
Do you ignore it -- do you rush down there every month because this could be the last -- or do you go on writing letters, sending postcards and calling to say I love you, trying to keep the normalcy in your tone of voice?
When do the constructs that you've built your whole life start crumbling?
Next Week? Tomorrow? Today?