Modern medicine can prolong life, and yet there is this interesting limbo into which the elderly can be thrust. My Dad is in rehabilitation in order to regain enough strength, in theory, to return to living independently. However, at the moment it is hard to see if that is possible. Every day, he is walked by physical or occupational therapists to a nearby exercise room, and does rounds of very simple arm and leg exercises. They give him a lot of time between repetitions, because it exhausts him. Somehow, your life flashes in front of your eyes, and you see a six-foot tall blond father at the wheel of the old Comet station wagon, or teaching one of us to ride a bicycle, or reaching to hit a lob on the tennis court. Blink again, and God bless him, here's this tiny figure struggling to make the smallest move. My Mom lived a year and a half after an aneurism that was supposed to kill her, and she became the Queen of the living room chair, calling in courtiers and politely enduring respiratory therapists. Yet toward the end, chewing was exhausting. Breathing was exhausting.
It is humbling, this whole process. Most of us will go through some variation of it, and being with an elderly parent at age 60 is a mirror of what could well be in future. Every emotion in the book has threatened to swamp my little boat this week, as things I'd suppressed after my mother's and brother's deaths surfaced. I'm doing my best to try to remember my own divine self, and deal as much as possible with my Dad's, brother's, and the caretakers' divine selves too-- that holy energy around them, not the shrunken, stressed or overworked bodies we are in. I guess in this kind of situation, that's the only "occupational therapy" there is.
