ShutUpHeExplained

A WOPR of a Solution

2004-07-28T13:58:00.000-04:00

Extinction (not the Dinosaur-type)

If all else fails and you want to try what the psychiatrists do, use Extinction.

No, that doesn't mean extinction of your mother or father. That means: Extinction of the behavior by ignoring whatever is being raved about, not responding verbally to agree with or disagree with what is being said about China, prisoners, Cubans, Bosnia or anything else.

Most of all extinction means NOT trying to REASON with your parent about ANYTHING. It is enough for you to know they are nuts. You don't have to point it out to them in any way, shape or form. [Unless you really are up for a good fight and lots of recriminations later ... which I definitely would not advise, as it just leads to greater deterioration of the older person.]

Since the first time I heard it, I have been fascinated with a phrase from the movie "WAR GAMES." The WOPER computer concludes, vis-a-vis global nuclear warfare, that "the only winning move is not to play." If you don't remember anything else about Gripes and Gripers, remember that advice: the only winning move is not to play (i.e., use extinction, ignore the argumentative person and change to some other topic).

The Sundown Syndrome

2004-07-28T13:55:00.000-04:00

What Happens at "sunset"

By and large these Gripes will be part of what psychiatrists call "The Sundown Syndrome." (Sometimes referred to as "Sundowner Syndrome.") The term refers to the fact that toward the end of the day (maybe when the sun actually goes down, maybe a little earlier or later), when a geriatric-aged person gets tired, when the energy runs out and their ego defenses erode, like children who throw tantrums before bed time, they lose control.

Ego defenses, for all of us, are those interpersonal skills that we have and use to moderate our behavior, to censor what we say and to evaluate the logic (or lack thereof) in what we are thinking and about to say. If you have ever "blown up" at someone, and then had to go back and apologize, then you know what happens when your ego defenses erode. Or if you have ever said: "All right, dammit! That's the last straw!" and then taken action to correct something that you have wanted to correct a long time ago, you know about eroded ego defenses. Passivity turns to aggression. Swallowing your pride turns to asserting your rights. Keeping quiet turns into a screaming personal diatribe against whoever the foe of the moment happens to be.

They got it right in the song Mississippi Mud: "When the sun goes down and the moon comes out, everybody sit around and shout ...!" [my variation on the next part is: "Hey, Hey! Uncle Dud! When Sundowners yell, I'll stick my head in the mud."] Because what you might feel is the urge to run away and bury your head in the mud just to get away from the anger and agitation. But if you do that, you have just forgotten that you have a powerful "weapon" in your management arsenal: a "verbal gun," so to speak, which has a "trigger," and you can pull it whenever you hear a Sundowner beginning to Gripe.

Use your trigger to shoot off a good word or phrase that will totally distract the Griper. This is the time to have the short list of favorite triggers in mind. Throw one out and change the subject. Do it with a little finesse by adding, "Gee, Grandpa, I don't know why, but all of that reminded me of the time you took us fishing at the Lake." Yes, it sounds nutty, to throw in something as unconnected to Bosnia as "fishing at the Lake" (or whatever the topic of the rant was). But try it. It works. And no one said dealing with illogical folks had to be logical.

If it is a TV program or newscast that set them off, use your trigger finger on the remote and just change the channel. If the visual cues from the new program don't shift the topic away from the ranting and raving, then combine the visual with a verbal trigger. You really shouldn't have much trouble halting the nonsense.

2004-07-28T13:50:00.000-04:00

Griper: "And then there's that segment on ABC World News Tonight that just makes me furious! It's called "Your Money." They spend all that time pointing out where the U. S. Government is spending all of my tax money, billions for toilet seats (and they probably don't have the toilets to put them on) and God Only Knows what else. And they never tell me where to write or who to call to express my dissatisfaction with the way the money is being wasted. Well, I love Peter Jennings, but they ought to let him tell us where to call, because I would like to give a couple of people a piece of my mind." ... and then they circle the drain and go into the toilet emotionally for the rest of the night.

Whew! [Those were real rants and ravings. And just transcribing them makes me tired and sad and a little agitated myself.] As Dave Barry says: "I am not making this up." No. I am really NOT making this up. These are the types of Gripes that you may have to put up with. They are complaints about a pseudo-authentic part of the world ("Cuba," "The Cubans," "Bosnians," "prisoners," etc.), but mixed with solutions that wouldn't be permissible, even if you could get someone to go along with the abuses and violations that would result.

What's more interesting to us, having watched this and heard from others that it is exhibited by their relatives, too, is the two, diametrically-opposed points of view:

1. The totally internal, thinking out loud, repetitive monologues that are run and re-run without awareness of the repetition, the mindless recounting, the lack of interest on the part of the listener and all the other egocentrically-oriented, insular aspects of prattle; and,

2. The globally external, ranting about situations so enormous, so distant, so monumental in complexity, with solutions so outlandish that no one would implement them even if they had the power to do it (unless you postulate the return of Hitler or Stalin or global domination by some current megalomaniac).

It's as if, on the one hand, there is the Internal Personal World (one circle) and, on the other hand, there is the Global External World (another circle), but there is no Rational, Intermediate, Interactive World (a third circle). None of the three circles seems to touch the others, let alone overlap. They all exist alone, unconnected, and unaware that the others exist, instead of touching, overlapping, interacting and aware of each other, as they are for the rest of us.

They are Living Worlds Apart from the Rest of Us

They live within the Internal Personal World and Think Out Loud, which affects, but does not really communicate or have a conversation with the Rational Intermediate Interactive World.

They rant about the Global Impersonal World and formulate grandiose solutions for unsolvable problems, becoming supremely agitated and depressed because of the lack of response from that Global World they are "trying to help."

The Brits Sent Theirs to Australia

2004-07-28T13:46:00.000-04:00

Griper: "Federal prisoners. What the hell. I know what to do with them. Send them all to China. Draw up a contract with the Chinese to build a wing on their worst prison facility, furthest from the prying eyes of the international press corps and the Amnesty International folks. Ship all of our federal prisoners to China. Pay the Chinese in dollars at some rock-bottom rate (in our eyes), but one that will exceed what the Guards would get paid by 10-fold and what the Warden would get bribed with by even more than that. "

"They'll make more money than they ever dreamed of and it will only cost us pennies a day instead of the $20,000 to $50,000 a year that it costs us to house them in the U.S. Suspend all those damn human rights watches over those prisoners and let the Chinese handle them the same way they have handled their own people, just the way I saw them do it on A&E or one of those Discovery Channel / The Learning Channel Specials about prisons around the world. You know, the one that showed Chinese and Turkish and Russian prisoners. By God, when those people get out of prison, they don't want to go back. "

"And By God a second time [now they are getting really agitated], when the little snots in the U.S. realize that they are not going to some goddamn Country Club here in the U.S., they will quit kiting checks and quit selling junk bonds and quit raping and murdering young, innocent girls." ... and really, really downhill into an agitated, hysterical depression and anger at the specific situation, the government, the country (whatever that is), the people who run it and the world in general for being such a rotten place ... which is a gross oversight because if the government asked them, they would be happy to tell them how to make it all better!

Another global problem solved ...

2004-07-28T13:45:00.000-04:00

Griper: "Bosnia-Herzigovina, now there's a fine kettle of fish. They weren't satisfied a couple of hundred years ago and they still aren't satisfied. All they have ever done, except when Tito said he would drop an anvil on them from the top of a tall building, was fight with each other. What the hell are we sending troops over there for? Why should we shoulder such risk? Who is the idiot in government who thinks we will solve their unsolvable problems? They should go back to an enlightened dictatorship or a constitutional monarchy and whip those stupid b...d subjects of theirs into line." ... and further downhill, becoming angry at everyone in the room for not calling Washington and telling them "what's what."

The World According to GRIPE

2004-07-28T13:42:00.000-04:00

Prattle, Rattle, Trigger and Gripe

Dichotomy. What a great word. Di = two. Chotomy = to chop. Therefore, to chop into two parts. With pre-senile people or senescent folks, we confront a real dichotomy within the sphere of interest of the older person. On the one hand, they are focused on their own totally internal world of past experiences. They seem to exist in another world, one that has little connection to the world in which we live, one from which they seem to be unable to reach out and make contact with our reality. They talk about dead friends, people we never knew or, if we knew them, we never liked them and don't care whatever happened to them. They think out loud about all kinds of things that are going on inside their own heads. They talk "at" the world, instead of "with" or "to" the world and the people in it.

On the other hand, there is an interesting exception, global problems.

Griper: "I think there is something obviously wrong with all the Cubans in the world. They didn't like Castro, so they all got in little tiny boats and came to the U.S. All they have done since they came here is raise hell about what is wrong with our country. They don't learn to speak English. They want all the benefits of U.S. education, health care, welfare, jobs, income, cars, houses, clothes. But when they get all of that, they complain because it isn't enough, they don't have "rights" and they don't like our laws. Well, now they have two countries they don't like, Cuba and the U.S. Where the hell are they ever going to be satisfied. And besides that, after forty years of complaining about Castro, nothing has changed. If they are going to be eternally dissatisfied with wherever they are, they should go back to Cuba and take some of the energy they waste demonstrating here in the U.S. and apply it to an uprising in Cuba itself to change the system to whatever they want it to be. Either that or expand Krome Detention Center and put them all in there until they can behave." ... and downhill from there … to the next monologue …

Trigger ("horse; Roy Rogers; Rogers, Arkansas ...")

2004-07-28T13:39:00.000-04:00

Trigger

There are trigger words and trigger phrases. A trigger word is one which, if injected into a conversation with someone susceptible to flight of ideas, will change the entire direction of the conversation, leaving the old line of thought behind and shifting to facts and ideas surrounding the new word which "triggered" the new discussion. A trigger phrase is just a familiar reference or catch phrase ("nothing ventured, nothing gained" or the like) which, like a trigger word, shifts the topic of conversation.

As discussed under Prattle, you can use trigger words to consciously stop a conversation or story which you don't want to hear, having already been bored to death by it multiple times. You should also be aware of what trigger words and phrases can and will do for a different reason.

Imagine you and an older person are having a really fine conversation about some brand new topic. You are interested in it and want to continue along the current line of thinking. You have never heard this story about your uncle or you didn't know that you even had a cousin who lived in Brisbane, Australia, until now. But inadvertently, in your excitement about hearing something new and different, you say: "Wow! So that cousin is a niece of Aunt Louise ... " Oops! Yep, Aunt Louise who was married to the steeple jack and lived in Montgomery" ... and you have nailed yourself to the wall again. Don't interject triggers that will start conversations you don't want to hear.

You can't avoid all of the triggers in the world, because you never know what is going to set someone off on a tangent. But after a while you will probably have a pretty good idea of what some of the most effective, standard ones are. To prove to yourself that they are triggers and they are going to precipitate a predictable monologue, try dropping a trigger into the middle of any random conversation and see what happens. Otherwise, avoid them, unless you want to hear the monologue that the trigger stimulates.

Prattling Compounded

2004-07-28T13:37:00.000-04:00

You're Rattling My Cage

When a prattler thinks out loud (mumbles, grouses, grunts and groans) to himself or herself it is irritating enough. But another aspect that makes it worse is when they prattle to you with a voice that makes it hard to understand what they are saying. In this case the problem is not a psychological one, but a physical one. Muscles are muscles and, as we get older, they get weaker. This includes the voice box (larynx: pronounced LAIR-inks, not Lar-NICKS).

The voice gets weak, they seem to have to clear their throat all the time and they have a rasp or rattle in their voice all the time. "Clear your throat and speak up, for God's sake, if you want me to understand what you are saying" is not an uncommon feeling to have at these times. You can try saying: "What? I couldn't understand you because you are speaking to softly," but it probably won't work. Saying that is like telling a weight lifter who has never lifted more than 150 pounds that he needs to be stronger and lift 300 pounds or you will throw him out of the contest. No way that he is going to "get stronger" in an instant just because you want him to.

This is one that will try your patience, but you will just have to live with it. Listen more closely and ask them to tell you again if you need to. Don't press too hard, though, because there is really not much they can consciously do about failing voice strength. The only caveat is this: if you catch them talking in a normal tone of voice to a friend (e.g., on the telephone or in person), but almost whispering to you, then they are playing games with you to get the attention they want, think they need and think they are not getting from you.

The tough way to handle that is to confront them with the facts ("I have heard you talking to Louise in a normal tone of voice. There is nothing wrong with your voice. If you want to have a conversation with me, then talk to me like you normally do with Louise or I won't acknowledge you.") There are other approaches, but you probably won't have the patience to employ them. Anyway, there is nothing illegal or immoral about directness. If it comes down to a standoff, you can also consider being direct about the fact that a soft voice is manipulation to get attention, but if they really want your willing attention, they will speak up and talk so you can hear them easily.

Uninterruptable Prattle

2004-07-28T13:33:00.001-04:00

You Can't "Interrupt" Prattle

Prattle is, by definition, like a tracks of music on a CD-ROM. You can change tracks at the end of a song, or jump from one to another right in the middle of a piece. With real music on a CD, you know you can always come back and finish listening to the track you jumped away from. With prattle, the speaker knows at some level of understanding, that they can always come back and finish the story. So, if you divert the music stream from one track to another, unlike a real dialogue between two communicating adults, the prattler will just shift with you from one track to another. Here is an example of some dialogues between a Prattler and a Prattlee:

Prattler (re some lady named Louise): "... and then I said to Louise, you know Louise, the one I have told you about before, her husband was the steeple jack from Montgomery, Alabama ..."

Prattlee (re Montgomery, AL): "Yes, Mom. And speaking of Montgomery, did I tell you that we were there on our last trip through the South?" And you have moved from "Louise" to "Montgomery" without telling her to shut up because you have heard all about Louise so many times that you would kill Louise yourself, if she weren't dead already.

OR ... (continue on to the next posting) ...

... continued Prattle

2004-07-28T13:33:00.000-04:00

Prattler (re Louise): "... and then I said to Louise, you know Louise, the one I have told you about before, her husband was the steeple jack from Montgomery, Alabama ..."

Prattlee (re "jack" and gardens and roses): "You know, Mom, speaking of steeple jack, that reminds me of Jack, our next door neighbor, who invited you to come over and look at the new roses in his garden. Wouldn't you like to go see them right now?"

We'll talk more about Triggers below. Now you should know that "Montgomery" and "Jack" are triggers or trigger words that the Prattlee has used to completely change the direction of conversation in an apparently legitimate manner. Or at least in a manner that won't make the Prattler angry.

The reason triggers work is because people who Prattle are prone to the condition called "flight of ideas." You can think of "flight of ideas" as meaning the same thing as a dynamic game of "Verbal Leapfrog." In the game of leapfrog, you jump over one person and then over the next one. In Verbal Leapfrog, or flight of ideas, you jump from one idea to the next. In fact, the expression of one idea may lead you to use words that remind you of another idea, so you leap from one to another endlessly.

Another way to think about "flight of ideas" is to envision driving your car through a fog bank. Let's say you can see 50 yards ahead in the fog, but beyond that there is nothing but white. As you move forward through the fog bank, your ability to see ahead moves forward, too. You first see a "Curve Ahead" sign, but you can't see the curve, you drive forward some more and the curve comes in to view, then you see a tree on the left and you begin to think and talk about trees, then as you keep driving though the fog your attention turns to a school on the right, and you begin to think and talk about schools. You are leap-frogging through the fog from one thing you can see, think and talk about to the next.

Flight of ideas is leap-frogging from one word or phrase to the next. When the Prattler was talking about Louise, she did not have "sight of Montgomery" as a topic. But when "Montgomery came into view" as the conversation turned the corner, all of the sudden Louise was forgotten and Montgomery was the topic. In the same way, when the topic was Louise's husband's work as a steeple jack, the garden next door and the roses in it were nowhere in sight. Then the Prattlee rounded the corner, picked up on "jack" and turned the Prattler's attention to the garden, its roses and getting out of the house for a while. More about triggers a little later in this section.

Prattle: Thinking Out Loud

2004-07-28T13:31:00.000-04:00

One of the Keys to Understanding ElderBehavior

We all think (well, at least most of us think a little bit) all of the time. You know as well as we do that there are scripts or dialogues or conversations going on inside your head all the time. If you think "Victoria's Secret" [whatever that is] would be a shocker, you should be so unlucky as to become privy to the secret thoughts and conversations going on inside the head of your boss, the bosses spouse, your own spouse, your kids or your favorite TV, political, religious or business idol. There are two good things about most of the garbage that is rattling around in all of our heads:

                               1. We don't say most of it out loud; and,
                               2. We don't take action on any of it.

And that is precisely the problem with senescent people or early dementia patients: they lose the self-control mechanisms that we all have that keep our internal mental ramblings locked up inside our heads. When that self-control goes, they become unwilling and unaware victims of "thinking out loud."   If it goes through their mind, it comes out their mouth.

The more their ability to recall recent experiences decreases, the more they try to remember whatever is left.

The harder they try to remember it, the less likely they are to have energy left to pay attention to the fact that they are not just thinking about things, trying to remember past events, they are actually thinking and talking out loud about those events at the same time.

If you disregard the lyrics and listen to the "music" you will hear repetitive and, therefore, annoying, accounts of the same stories, the recounting of which is reassuring to the speaker.

In addition to realizing that they are trying to reassure themselves, you might also note that they seem to be both talking out loud and talking to themselves. Many older folks who prattle on, will continue unabated with their stories, even if you walk away, go to the kitchen, try to watch TV or read the paper. This, of course, can be irritating in itself if you really are interested in hearing what the TV news anchorperson is saying.

The fact that they are, in part, talking to themselves can also represent a burden that is lifted off your shoulders. [The burden in real, two-way dialogue with another coherent and communicating adult demands that you pay attention and respond in some rational way to what is being said.]

Because they are, in fact, talking to themselves to gain self-reassurance and not really having a dialogue with anyone, you may find that the only response you have to give from time to time is something as simple as "Oh?" or "Yes" or "Really!" The two brain cells in your gray matter you have to rub together to get "Really!" out of your mouth leaves a couple of billion cells left to think about whatever is important to you at the time. Hardly a burden intellectually. [You do have to be careful to not say "Oh, how nice." if they are telling you (again) about some acquaintance who died, but beyond that you don't really have to put much into it.]

Prattle, Rattle, Trigger & Gripe

2004-07-28T13:29:00.000-04:00

Prattle 01

The essence of senescence seems to be an endless stream of prattle from early morning until late at night. We have deduced that, upon awakening in the morning, the older the person asks themselves the question: "Does my mouth work?" If it does, they run it all day long. They take one, huge deep breath and continue to talk all morning, afternoon and evening, until they fall asleep in the middle of a sentence just before 10 PM.

Listen to the Music, not the Lyrics

This prattling probably serves a number of purposes, the most important of which is reassurance. They are reassured that they can think of (most) of the words they want to use (never mind that they have to hesitate for agonizingly long periods to find the words they are looking for, one after another). They are reassured to hear that they can still string those words together in more or less coherent sentences (never mind the fact that the topics were germane 55 years ago and the people being referred to were not only unknown to you, but are all dead). They are reassured that they can string the sentences together and still remember the story du jour (or histoire du moment) from start to finish (never mind that they have recounted it at least 13 times in the past week and four times already today). Finally, they are reassured that if they keep talking and are always in the middle of some long, drawn-out story, they will remain alive and well, as God would not do them the injustice of interrupting them in the middle of "a very interesting experience" to shut them up forever (never mind that everyone in the room would like to do just that).

If all you do is listen to the Lyrics of "the songs they sing," in a very short time, given continuous, daily exposure to an elderly relative and the finite list of their favorite anecdotes, you will have the lyrics to all the "songs" memorized. You should avoid the desire to interrupt them when you hear "the one about the bus stop" to prove to them you already know the story by reciting it back to them verbatim and ending with an angry "we have heard that one enough, don't ever tell it again." That will shut them up for the moment, but will also result in your having to put up with behavior you will like even less than the story-telling. They will get angry, hostile, hurt, depressed, anorexic and withdrawn. Those behaviors are much more difficult to cope with than the prattling, if you know how to handle it.

"... I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

2004-07-28T13:25:00.000-04:00

"Send me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free,
The restless refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Inscription on the statue of Liberty, NY Harbor.

Like it or not, convenient or not for us at the time, the wooden barrier between the inner sanctity of our home and the cold, cruel world outside became (as yours may become) a golden door. A golden door which swung open to welcome a mother, displaced from a mid-west home of 50-plus years, first to the state next door, then all the way to the mid-Atlantic coast. She was tired from the dislocation. She was thin and frail from a recent bout of gastrointestinal upset which left her unable to eat, resulting in a major loss of weight. All the worse because it was iatrogenic (caused by a combination of medications that her multiple physicians should never have given her). She was separated from all of her friends in the midwest and lonely. Being a widow, her life-long companion was not there for conversation, support and shared ideals.

She finds herself like most elders, being the fulfillment of Lawrence Peter's (author of The Peter Principle) variation on a comment by Bert Kruger Smith: "Old age is when you finally know all the answers, but nobody asks you the questions."

She was forced to move; we were forced to educate ourselves on a day-to-day basis about what had happened to her, what was happening to us currently and what could happen to us in future. Travel with us through the experiences, the frustrations and the solutions. Don't let the experience kill you. Learn from our mistakes and successes. Don't die. Grow and enjoy the journey. You will be a better person for it.

Hopefully, you will agree that we have met Wilde's criteria for hypocrisy by the time you finish reading. ["I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked, and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy." Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).]

"It is the chief point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is." Desiderius Erasmus (1465- 1536), died 400 years before I was born. I have written what I have written because I am what I am. But only to help you be who you are ... and be a better person for that, too.

If you don't like what I have written, just remember that I will probably end up fulfilling the comment by Leo Rosenberg when he said: "First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down."

Having said all that, I will lift my lamp and try to light your way through the door. Step gingerly, but step forward.

Time Flies ...

2004-07-28T10:48:00.000-04:00

...When You're Not Having Fun

So, this was our situation, and the one we hope you will learn from: a sudden decision by a family member to become voluntarily unemployed, to move to a distant metropolitan area city where she has no support network of personal or business friends (aside from her son, a busy MBA and his wife, a lawyer, both with day jobs), dump an 88 year-old parent on two busy professionals (physician and psychologist) who live in a very small beach house and have an active life both inside and outside their home, drive to the new city and move in with her son and daughter-in-law and make no effort to look for a job for the first four weeks (for those of you who are not paying attention:

"Four weeks" Defined: that's a whole month, 30 days, 720 hours, 43,200 minutes [28,800 minutes of daytime, during which you are probably awake and listening to "Prattle, Rattle, Trigger and Gripe" (explanatory chapter to follow)]. Since we believe that most readers, like ourselves, understand the consequences of homicide, elder abuse and near-psychotic raving at a family member (over the telephone between our home and Atlanta), you gotta cope with it. And how you gonna cope, huh, smart guy and smart gal?

For better or for worse, we'll tell you how we did it. We'll recount the slow, painful manner in which our awareness increased, was clarified and helped us formulate a plan to cope with this change and resolve it. We'll try to tell you how we managed the day-to-day activities.

We'll recount how we had to expand our definition of fairness, to take into account the age, mental and physical infirmity of an 88 year-old.

We'll share our anger with you and tell you that if you think you are not angry you have just proven one of our favorite sayings:

"As we grow old and lose our mental faculties, the very last one to go is our ability to deceive ourselves."

Hell, if you're not angry at all this disruption in your life, you're either dead, an out-and-out liar or not paying attention at all. (That's the second time I've mentioned paying attention.)

The anger, of course, led to spite, "the malicious, usually petty, desire to harm, annoy, frustrate or humiliate another person or persons," and spiteful feelings. The spiteful feelings led us to conclude almost immediately that any action based on our spiteful feelings would be the epitome of counter productiveness. If we took it out on mom, we would have to live with the consequences 43,200 minutes per month (don't subtract the time you would be asleep, because mothers can make you suffer then, too). If we took it out on sister, she could stonewall the motherly-move from our house to hers forever (e.g., by not "being able to find a suitable house to buy," not being able to find a job, by staying with her son forever, who, by the way, doesn't really have another room for his mother to live in permanently, to say nothing of his disinclination to have one more person living with them and their two children, three and one years old).

So, here we go, with some humor and what we hope will give you (as it has us) some insight. May you stand on our shoulders to see farther into your own future, know more about what you are getting yourself into by saying "yes" to a simple request, and know how to cope with it better should a similar situation ever arise for you.

An "Uncomplicated" Decision

2004-07-28T10:46:00.000-04:00

Simple is as Simple does

Simple all right! Simple me. Simple wife. Simple-minded plan for what almost turned in to the female equivalent of the stageplay "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (and stayed for years). Don't even consider what the script of the stageplay "The 88 year-old Mother / GreatGrandMother Who Came to Stay Forever (and almost did)" would be like.

It was such a simple-minded response on our part that we didn't think through a few crucial points, e.g., my sister has no computer skills, the "job market" for 58 year-old female salespeople is diddley, especially if they are currently unemployed. The size of that job market contracts perceptibly when the job-seeker demands three-times what salespeople in Atlanta get, wants perks on top of that and wants to work from home. The complicatedness of the situation expands exponentially when the job-seeker really doesn't want to work at all, really wants to stay at her son's house in Atlanta and play with the two grandkids and really doesn't want to take mom back with her. Obviously, this is "simple request" became a very complicated situation. It seemed to grow minute-by-minute into one which demanded a totally different approach on our part (and yours, if it happens to you) if we wanted to bring the curtain down on this tragi-comic performance in any reasonable time.

Awareness, Fairness, Anger and Spite

2004-07-28T10:45:00.000-04:00

Awareness, Fairness, Anger and Spite

So, this is a book about management ... and more important ... a book about self-management. It is a book about awareness ... , fairness ... , anger ... and spite. By the time you finish reading it you should have more ...(awareness), feel more ... (fairness), control your ... (anger) and not be so ... (spite)-ful .

It is also about generation gaps, cross-cultural conflict and going home again, which Tom Wolfe convinced us we will never be able to do. What's worse, this book is about closing the generation gap, entering into cross-cultural conflicts and trying to go home again, despite the fact that we really don't have the inclination to do any of those things. If we are honest (which, of course, begs the question of political correctness) with ourselves, we don't really want to close the generation gaps, we try to avoid cross-cultural (subjective) conflicts about personal preferences and, having left home at the earliest possible moment, we don't really want to go within a hundred miles of "home" if it means hearing a parent say: "When you're in my house, you'll do things my way." More to the point, this book is about what my wife and I learned about parents, parents-in-law, old people and geriatric medicine while hosting my 88 year-old mother in our very small beach house for 6 months.

All of this happened, thanks to my sister who doesn't know what the phrase "plan ahead" means. On spur-of-the-moment she decided to quit her job, sell her house and move herself and our mother from their home in Kansas City to Atlanta. We answered her plea to "give her a couple of weeks free" by taking mom into our house so she could find a new job and a new house. Then she would move mom down to Atlanta and things would be back to normal. Simple enough, right? I can hear it now: "A couple of weeks. No problem. She can sleep on the hide-a-bed in the front study. We'll move the second TV in there so she can watch what she wants. We'll go out for dinner a couple of times and take her to the symphony or a movie and that will be that."

Wealth: Can the Cycle Turn Up One More Time?

2004-07-28T10:44:00.000-04:00

Wealth: Can the Cycle Turn Up One More Time?

Surely it can. But, this time you have to be better prepared, better self-educated, more aware of yourself and your own feelings, and much more in control of your own behavior. You also have to be ready to relinquish control over your spouse. That means giving permission to each other to do whatever (within reason and within the law, short of homicide of a family member) needs to be done to get through the disruption of having a new member in your family. Having an ElderPerson dropped into your family on short notice makes them the "new kid on the block."

The "new kid" reference is more truth than humor. The truth is based on the behavior of the parent who is newly injected into your current family life. The behavior is based on failing memory, failing physical strength and (maybe) coordination, failing contact with the external world and regression into their own, personal "world of the past." They were originally children, grew up to be adults and then parents, and now they are children again, with most of the dependency of children. The dependency is what turns your castle into an institution. The dependency is what you have to manage, what you have to give your spouse permission to manage, what you have to delegate to professionals to manage when the time comes. The dependency will eat you up, lock, stock and barrell, emotionally and physically, if you don't manage it.

The Market Crashes

2004-07-28T10:31:00.000-04:00

Destitution, The Market Crashes

Then, about the time we were enjoying the riches of one-on-one conversation, renewed physical contact and self-directed adult activities like dining out, movie-going, taking in a play or symphony or just walking on the beach or going for a drive, we "got very poor" again. Mom could not take care of herself any more, and our castle became an institution, the dream became a nightmare and the royal existence became serfdom, paying homage by (as the guilt-inducing book titles put it: "caring for the parents who cared for you") taking care of one or both of the old folks.

Be Careful What You Wish For ...

2004-07-28T10:30:00.000-04:00

... or You May Get It: Destitution

Then we "got poor" again. The kids came, one at a time, one after another, demanding more and more of the time we used to use for conversation, contact (psychological and physical) and communication. Conversations deteriorated to "Yep!" and "Nope!" when a question could be heard and understood. Psychological contact was broken by the "little people" who were emotionally interposed between the two of us. Physical contact was difficult, if not impossible, due to the unpredictable threat of physical injury, pscyhological cry for help or physical intrusion into the bedroom at the most inopportune times. It was just easier to "be poor" than it was to risk the emotional trauma of forcing communication and contact.

Wealth, The Cycle Turns Up

Then we "got rich" again. The kids grew up, could be left with a baby sitter, we could steal a night out and could sometimes talk at home, during the day (on weekends) or during the week (at lunchtime, since the kids ate at school). If we hadn't waited too long during the child-rearing days, we still had emotional, psychological and physical issues in common, about which we could still have mutually satisfying conversation, contact and communication. We could enjoy our new-found companionship and share our common interests in the new light of our current growth phase.

The Wealth <-> Destitution Round-Trip

2004-07-28T10:29:00.000-04:00

The Intellectual Cycle from Wealth to Destitution and Back Again

My grandmother used to say: "It isn't hard to get rich, but it surely is hard to get poor." If you think of conversation, contact, and communication as being the currency of a personal relationship, then "getting poor" is what happens when you take another person into your home and are forced by their presence to relinquish all (or most) meaningful, focused, uniterrupted, high-level intellectual converstation, contact and communication with your spouse.

Wealth, Self-created

In terms of conversation, contact and communication, you "got rich" when you moved away from home, found your one-and-only life's mate, set up your own home and rejoiced in your own little two-person nuclear family. It was, for many of us, like going to Heaven without having to die to get there. The conversation made us feel rich with insights. The togetherness made us feel rich because of the companionship. The communication made us feel richer each day as we hammered the rough points of difference into a sea upon which we could sail smoothly.

2004-07-28T10:27:00.000-04:00

How Does One Make Use of a Tour through Hell?

"An adult who ceases, after youth, to unlearn and relearn his facts and to recondsider his opinoions ... is a menace to a democratic community." Edward Thorndike

Use it by reading, thinking, applying the parts that are relevant to your own situation and modifying the ones that aren't. Modify the principles and concepts so they elucidate, assist in understanding, give you insight and control over your own personal situation. You must actually read AND think, because (despite what you might have hoped for while shelling out your hard-earned cash) this book contains more questions than it does answers. Questions like:

      "Why do older people do what they do?"
      "Why don't they stop doing that, since they know it irritates me?"
      "How was I ever so short-sighted as to fall into this trap?"
      "More important: how can I get out of this ever-deepening pit I have fallen in to?"

William Ellery Channing's (1780-1844) comment:

      "Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do," will raise more questions like:

      "Why did they have to have THESE characteristics?" (Because Channing was right: Everyone is different.)

      "No one else's parents do THESE things! Why did I have to inherit one who behaves this way?" (Take heart. Most people lie about the way their parents behave. The feedback we have been given by readers indicates to us that you aren't really the only one being treated this way.)

      "Will I end up being like they are? Is my acorn going to fall close to the tree?" (Is this God-awful behavior inevitable? Will we all end up behaving this way, being difficult to handle and unattractive to be around? Maybe. Maybe not.)

      "How can I keep from doing the same things to my family when I get old?" (You are taking a big step toward being different right now.)

      "Since people are what they are, and who they are, how could I have had all these dreadful, hostile thoughts about this person who raised me? What the hell kind of person am I? Cold? Selfish? Uncaring?" (Maybe. Probably not.)

Whatever the questions raised, remember one thing: don't quit. Don't quit reading. Don't quit thinking. Don't quit assessing their behavior, your own responses, those of your spouse and kids. Don't quit analyzing and learning. Keep going because the more you think and understand, the more you can separate yourself from your inner drives to lose control and say or do things you will regret. Remember: "Make sure your words are sweet so, when you have to eat them, you won't choke to death." Don't quit reading, thinking and learning. "Grow or die" is an unequivocal truism. Don't die. Keep growing!

The Players and the Scope of Hell

2004-07-28T10:26:00.000-04:00

The Players

So, the focus is narrow. It is specific to the maternal gender and a two-person professional family. It is more specific in that it deals with the mother of the husband, who interacts with her son and her daughter-in-law. I am aware that this may ignore your situation: mother moving in with daughter and son-in-law; father moving in with daughter and son-in-law; father moving in with son and daughter-in-law; mother and father moving in with either son or daughter (and their spouse); mother or father or both moving in with a single parent (God forbid!); mother, father or both moving in with son or daughter who is divorced from previous spouse and now remarried (that is actually what our situation is: with mother, son and son's second wife). My apologies to any of you for whom this book is less-than-specific. I do think if you concentrate on the concepts of ElderPerson Behavior, and not so much on the gender deficiencies, that most of the content will be relevant.

If you would like to offer feedback, suggestions, additions or corrections, please see the "Reply" section of this book.

The Scope of Hell

As alluded to above: there is a distinct possibly that the scope of this book is far too narrow. We have tried to keep the text limited to information which I feel, having lived through it, is useful, pragmatic, and immediately applicable to the real lives of real people. We have avoided, as much as possible, theoretical analyses of the underlying motivations for what happens when cultures, young and old, collide.

Introduction: A Guided Tour of Hell

2004-07-28T10:23:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Your Personal Guided Tour of Hell

The Focus

Our focus is primarily on what we have experienced: the husband's mother, widowed in a distant city when her husband of 55 years finally expired after 10 years of failing memory, the last seven of which were spent in a nursing home. Mother and sister had been living together after selling their own homes. The mother/mother-in-law was thrust into our small (1350 square foot) beach home when his sister decided (rather precipitously) to sell the home in which mother and sister had been living for 2.5 years. In addition to selling the home, the sister decided she wanted to get out of her current job, which she didn't like, move to a larger metropolitan area, and live with relatives while she looked for a job. Because she wanted to be unencumbered by having mother to take care of, "it was decided" that mother would move in with son and daughter-in-law "for a few weeks." The sister called and said: "I am sending Mom to you on Sunday." Which just happened to be the first day of a planned vacation to the British Virgin Islands, which had to be cancelled, causing some loss of deposits. Not a great way to start off a relationship.

[If you don't learn anything else from this book LEARN THIS: when a family member asks you to take an ElderPerson into your home, the term "a few weeks" should be assessed as if it meant "a few years," because that's what it is going to seem like. Be warned! Even if it actually turns out to be "a few weeks," you should still assess your decision based on the possibility that it could be forever. The second week mom was with us she fell off a chair. Nothing was broken, but that could have turned the whole thing from "a few weeks" to "forever," as my sister would not have been in any position to take care of an invalid.

Now, at the end of the first paragraph, you have learned that the focus of this book is also conversational as well as conceptual. The [ ] brackets indicate an expansion of a monologue by the addition of a personal note. The focus will be on theory and concept, alternating with real anecdotes from our all-too-real life. I'll put an idea down, then tell you how it worked for us, or what happened to us when a specific situation arose. These are personal glimpses into my "Guests in the Attic," the thoughts, feelings, and peripheral comments that have occurred to me while writing this book.

I am no E. L. Doctorow(*), but I am (unknown to him) one of his greatest fans. You need to know that so, if you are unfamiliar with his body of work, you will understand that some of the paragraphs mimic (although not in quality) the manner in which he paints pictures of situations, fleshes out characteristics of the people in his books to make them so real you are sure you would know them on sight.

(*) I am, however, prone to say intuitively obvious things (like "I'm not E. L. Doctorow") which, as any fool will plainly see upon finishing this book, is one of the great understatements of the new millennium. I don't know the best word with which to lable my writing, being at the opposite end of the spectrum from Doctorow's, but if he is at the very least "stupendous," "a literary genius," and "a wizard at grabbing your attention so you can't put Billy Bathgate or Ragtime or even Drinks Before Dinner down until you have finished it," then I am at the other end, far beyond "ordinary," "a literary nobody who should probably have his word processor confiscated" or "one of those doctors who thinks he can write (but nobody has told him he can't)." So be it.

It may be true of me that, as Wilson Mizner said: "Failure has gone to his head." In spite of that, I am going to charge, crawl, plod and, sometimes speed, ahead with my task. I will, in addition to sharing my guests in my attic, will ask my wife to share some of hers and, between the two of us, we will tell you what we think the guests in ElderMom's Attic were saying to her while she was with us. [Now that she is back with my sister in Atlanta, we have no idea what sort of things might be going on in her attic ... and I'm not sure we really want to know.]