Turning the Page

Basket 'O Cat
Originally uploaded by Snak Shak

Well, it's been quite a journey lately.

It seems that almost all of my attention for the past six weeks or has been devoted to preparing for my parent's move to an assisted living facility located in the heart of The Ancestral Homeland.

If you have been through relocating parents, this is all old news; if you have not gone through this yet, a mere description could never suffice to capture the whole gestalt. The short snappy version of this is that moving parents entails business transactions with strangers, inventorying a lifetime of possessions to see what comes and what goes, getting the move planned and done, and then tucking them in to the new place and watching to see that everything is going to be okay. All this while managing a laundry list of chronic and acute health issues while trying your hand at applied behavioral psychology and anger management.

With the parent's now getting settled, I am looking forward to getting things back on track myself. As I have pointed out previously, I missed a few things that had been planned, including the 2012 Bike Summit, an information meeting on the Intercity Bike Trail, welding class, working at the food shelf, not one but two book club meetings, etc., etc.

That said, it was a rare gift indeed to have the time and energy necessary to devote to this passage. That is a luxury most people don't have when they face this phase in life. As easy as it would be to complain about the splash this made in my end of the swimming pool, that's all really embarrassingly minor compared to big things like my parent's future.

I am amazed at how all-consuming caregiving can be. Anyone who has been there knows that it fills the space you give it, and it always seems like there is more to do. I have been spared the brunt of this since I live so far away from my parent's and my siblings are much closer and did much, much more of the support work. I did get a better appreciation for the load they have shouldered, though, and that's kind of a gift, too.

There will be a few more trips to clean out the house, and probably another for the closing when it finally sells, but at this point I am resting up and making plans to get my personal trains back on the tracks.