Taking a Fall

I've fallen behind here, as I've been with my elderly dad who fell last week, and spent the better part of a week in the hospital. He tripped, and landed right on his face on a sidewalk. The impact broke his maxilla, the roof of his mouth. My brother and I have been helping his wife during this time, both while he is in the hospital and returning home.

A few observations.
I've worked in a hospital (as a chaplain), and been a patient (just for one night, in college), but have never played the role of the family member, ever present, at the patient's side. This is tiring. Even if you are not doing anything, this is hard work. I'm amazed how worn out I have been, going home in the evening.

It's unusual to have men doing this work. The nurse asked today if there would be women home to help with my dad's care (beyond his wife). My brother and I were suspect. However, one of my dad's nurses was male.

My dad received great care. It's a truism that patients who have family around them get the attention that others don't get. I felt sorry for those patients who were laying in dark rooms alone.

Healthcare has changed, and not all for the bad. My dad's wife worked many years ago as a nurse. She noted that at that time, no one except doctors gave patients and visitors any information. Now, technicians will provide vital signs as they take the measurements, (often with interpretation: 'ooh, that's high'), and the nurse is happy to open and help interpret the patient's charts for me.

I'm grateful my dad had good care at this local hospital, and is under the care of a fantastic doctor, who fortunately is happy taking my dad's medicare payments. We continue to work to see he gets good care (see previous post), but a good doctor and hospital makes it much easier. Now if we could just figure out how to expand medicare (or a better model) out to every American...

Aging Parents

Last night over dinner with friends, our conversation turned to that all too common topic, how do we deal with the situations of our aging parents. We especially struggle as our parents lose their strength and mental ability. We wish they'd give up driving, but know that is unrealistic, if they are to live independently. We worry about their finances, and pray they will give us more oversight and control in these areas. We agonize over their relaxed attitudes about medications and therapies, even when these attitudes have led to 9-1-1 calls and hospital stays. Our attempts to engage paid caregivers or other resources are rebuffed as intrusive and extravagant.

It is especially hard for those of us live half a continent or more away from our parents. Too many around us assume that if we really cared, we'd move back close to our parents, or uproot our folks and drop them in some care facility near here. This is, I think, the universal fear of our elders.

To complicate all this are the varying expectations of our siblings, especially those who are acting as on-site caregivers, or have done this in the past. Who makes the hard decisions? How do we balance safety and security against independence and freedom? I'm beginning to think that question touches deeper concerns than our aging elders. What do you think?

Photo by RebelBlueAngel

Making Retreat with the Jesuits

This last weekend, I 'made' a silent retreat with some sixty men, almost all Catholic, at a the Demontreville Jesuit retreat center near St. Paul. Most of the folks in this crowd were spiritually intentional laypeople, some served as deacons in their parishes, many had attended this retreat once a year for more than twenty years. It was silent: other than a conversation with the retreat leader, I was silent from after dinner Thursday night to dinner Sunday night.

The retreat leader, Father Jim Flaherty, teaches philosophy at Marquette University. He's a grad of JSTB, the Jesuit school that's part of the Graduate Theological Union (which includes Starr King School); we connected in remembering our times in Berkeley.

For a person who grew up with little contact with Catholic rituals and traditions, the learning curve for me was quite steep! And I had to work overtime to translate theology, language and narrative into something that I could work with in my own UU context. These Jesuits know how to pray! Like many UU's, prayer has been an issue for me, and I've struggled to find its utility in my process-based theology. I want to see prayer as more than just 'talking to God', certainly more than 'telling God what to do' (I saw a lot of that in the south). The retreat offered a number of methods for introspection and contemplation, for getting out of the head and into the heart. I hope to explore how these connect with other practices I've encountered (Buddhist, Islamic) and my own passage meditation practice.