Those Struggling With Aged Parents Find a Circle of Support

As his mother, old and infirm, lay in her hospital bed a few corridors away, Jay confessed thoughts which had once been unthinkable.

“I went to visit her in the hospital,” he began slowly. “And I don’t want to go back.”

“How are you?” he had asked.

No response.

“Can I get you something?”

Still nothing.

“Do you need anything?”

“She just does nothing,” Jay complained, his voice tinged with frustration and sadness. “She’s just sitting there. I was going to visit her tonight.”

He didn’t.

Instead, Jay joined two men and four women in an unusual support group headed by Margaret A. Longenecker, a family counselor who shows adults how to live with, and cope with, aging parents and their problems. His companions didn’t flinch when Jay said he could not bear to visit his mother that night. They just nodded.

The setting was a meeting room, still dressed in holiday decorations, at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia. The group, which meets weekly, sat in a circle beneath white paper snowflakes suspended from the ceiling. Beside a 1991 calendar someone had posted a paper cutout of the traditional depiction of the New Year as a baby, smiling and full of promise.

Over the next two hours, the men and women told their stories one by one, sadly describing once-vibrant parents now weakened by strokes and heart attacks.

Chris, a strapping 28-year-old salesman, said his father has never been the same since his stroke a year ago. “He had to write a check today and he couldn’t remember how to make a W,” Chris said.

Carol, a real estate agent, wondered how the family would meet her mother’s growing medical costs. “We’re running out of money,” Carol said. “I had to go into Mom’s CD.”

Sam described his mother as a 93-year-old irritable hypochondriac who is alienating her family and the staff of her retirement home.

“They’re probably going to bounce her out pretty soon,” Sam predicted. “I’ve reached a point where I don’t know what direction to go.”

Longenecker, a pale middle-aged woman with curly hair, listened sympathetically, offering advice and support. Caring for an aging parent “makes us think how it will be for us when we get that age,” she said.

But Longenecker did not coddle the group. When Carol said her mother could not decide whether to enter a rest home, Longenecker shot back, “She’s really not the problem. Your impotence is the problem.”

The mother needs constant care. The time has come, Longenecker said, for the family to take charge and place the woman in a home.

She even offered a sentence Carol could use to break the news: “Mother, it is coming to a time now when this will be the best thing for you.”

The room went quiet, the enormity of the advice settling in. The discussion moved to Claudia, a petite woman in a pale green sweat suit.

Her mother recently informed Claudia that she needed exploratory surgery on her lungs. The procedure is risky, her mother said, adding that she might have to be placed on life-support equipment if things went badly.

So Claudia’s mother had a request for her daughter.

“She informs me that I have to decide whether she goes on life-support systems,” Claudia recalled. Claudia held her ground. “I will not make that decision for you,” she said.

Longenecker smiled approvingly. There are times for children to take control, but sometimes parents must make decisions for themselves.

Longenecker turned to Jay. He told how he returned to his mother’s room at a retirement home, where she lived before being hospitalized, to gather some of her belongings. Without his knowledge, the staff had removed his mother’s bed, apparently assuming it would no longer be needed.

“It’s like seeing a tombstone in your front yard,” he said.

Longenecker asked Jay why he disliked visiting his mother in the hospital. Her unresponsiveness unsettles and confuses him, Jay said. Longenecker then announced that they would do some play acting and assumed the role of Jay’s mother.

When he asked how she felt today, Longenecker-mother replied that she was scared. The frank response startled him.

And so the exchanges went, Jay asking perfunctory questions, Longenecker speaking from the heart. She finally upbraided him for his stiffness, “I’m getting cold from you.”

“Too bad.”

Dropping her character, Longenecker asked why Jay would not let his mother discuss her fears. “I’d probably start crying,” he said.

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Last to speak was Chris, whose father, a stroke victim at the young age of 57, has lost interest in life, Chris said. He watches TV all day, never moving from his recliner.

“I bet he has a remote too,” Longenecker said.

“Yes.”

“Get rid of the remote,” she advised. “Seriously, get rid of it.” It only encourages sloth. An entire generation, she declared, is atrophying because of television, recliners and remote controls.

“I get so frustrated,” Chris said. Whenever he tries to interest his father in something new, the man resists.

“He’s still got a macho image,” said Claudia.

Chris, not really hearing her, went on, “Sometimes you just want to shake him.”

“Just love him,” Claudia said softly. “Just love him.”