How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Adventures In Alzheimer’s Land

“Growing old is a giant exercise in getting smaller. Not just your body, but your very life and ability to participate in it, shrink in lock-step with the size of the print on your numerous prescription bottles.”

This year when we stopped to visit my mom and dad in Reno en route to our annual Lake Tahoe beach vacation, it became immediately clear that my aging parents are entering a new phase of life, and therefore, so am I. My father’s war with Alzheimer’s is nearing its final few battles. And my mother’s diminishing ability to manage it along with her own failing health, means that for me, their only living adult relation, the beach will have to wait.

There’s such a selfish, shameful component to everything I feel — about spending my vacation with doctors, attorneys, bankers, contractors, cell phone companies — instead of reading a book in the shade of a giant evergreen on the shores of my childhood memories. And about all the hundreds of heart-breaking and time-stealing things that I will have to do over the next months and years — at the expense of my other family, my job, my health, my sense of well-being.

I don’t like my children seeing their grandfather like this. I don’t like the way they look at me or the questions they inevitably ask: Is this going to happen to you, mom? To us? They’ve heard me speak sternly, even harshly to both my parents as I try to temporarily take over everything they used to do for themselves and recreate a smaller form of it, something they might still be able to handle. Because I don’t want to be totally in charge of their lives yet. I still have quite a bit of my own that needs careful tending.

So is there a harsher, more punishing word for guilt? Even that would not begin to express what I feel as I drive away at the end of the week, after patching up my parents as best I can for now, leaving my father clutching his dog, muttering in his recliner, and my mom sobbing as she waves herself back into what is left of her existence.

It’s not that I didn’t see this coming. But I am still dreadfully, woefully and resentfully blind-sided.

Over-Achieving Didn’t Used To Happen Year-Round

Remember getting bored when you were a kid because there was nothing to do?

If, like me, you’re old enough to remember annual periods of guilt-free aimless time when you were young, you’re old enough to be a parent whose own kids have probably never had a similar experience.

Today, most sports, music and academic programs continue during school vacations and through the summer. I guess that’s so kids are never forced to take any risky breaks from improving their exploding talents. It also ensures that we parents will continue to have a place to go where other parents are gathered, so we have consistent bragging opportunities.

But for anyone who has considered making an effort to reduce their motherbragging while spending loads of unproductive time with their children, I recommend taking the summer off. This year I decided not to fill out a single application or pay a single penny to keep my children progressing at anything.

And I’m not worried. Because come fall, I’ll simply claim that my superior parenting methods include purposely exposing my children to a few months of nothing organized, scheduled or challenging.

No one has to know how difficult it has been to have my kids around every day, especially when what they do with their time might not be considered even remotely remarkable.