Our Aging Parents

My parents are now in their late 70's. Mom is 77 and Dad is 78. They were divorced a hundred years ago, so they live in two different houses in two different cities. It made for a very interesting Thanksgiving and Christmas dilemma, especially given the fact that I lived over an hour away from both of them.

It has been so weird to see over the course of time, while raising my children, suddenly becoming responsible for my parents for the first time. It started a couple of years ago, when I detected my father's frail voice on the telephone. There were days when he was so weak, he could not even answer the phone. I remember visiting him one Father's Day and being alarmed at how thin he and his girlfriend had become. He really was a shadow of the powerful man I knew growing up.

I began to ask questions. Dad has never been one to really open up and talk on an intimate level, so it took a lot of phone calls and persistent prying to get to the bottom of what was really going on. After a year and a half, Dad finally admitted to me that his girl friend had Alzheimer's. Add to that the fact that my father had a tumor on his pituitary gland the size of a golf ball, and my father was going down hill on the express train.