An aging parent forces agonizing decision

Getting through life requires a person to have some bounce.

I've spent the past couple of weeks working on my elasticity, dealing with one of those life events that's widely shared, but never feels like it when it's your turn.

My mother is no longer able to live on her own, but she doesn't know that.

My older brother got a temporary guardianship and placed her in a nursing home hours before I arrived at her door in New Mexico. I'd wanted to explore more options, but he's always been inclined toward quick action.

So I went from her house to the nursing home, and she said she was glad to see me. "Now I can go home," she said.

I told her it was more complicated than that.

While everyone else in the world was fixated on the death of Michael Jackson, my life rotated around a woman in a small room, who misses her dog, working in her yard and being the boss of herself.

I tried to explain why her doctor said she can't live alone: her faltering short-term memory and the hoarding disorder that went from inconvenient clutter to dangerous excess.

As a child, she was poor enough that the Great Depression made no impression on her, nothing to lose. She never throws anything away. But a few years ago she started stockpiling food, fearing she might be stuck home unable to get out for supplies. Never mind that my younger brother lives five minutes away and checks on her every day.

Two years ago we noticed the food hoarding had gotten much worse. My younger brother, my wife, my son and I cleaned out the old food and some of the other stuff.

Last year, we did it again. But we didn't know there was more food buried under boxes of clothes and clippings from newspapers and appliances that no longer work and paper towels and toilet tissue and cleaning supplies and notebooks.

She kept canned goods long enough for them to rot; she kept pasta, flour and rice long enough for mice to find them. That was finally too much.

Frugality had morphed into something else, but so gradually that until the mice appeared recently, we had been able to debate whether she had crossed the line yet.

Everyone I've spoken with about this situation, if they are my age or older, has a story to tell about an aging parent or grandparent.

On one leg of my flight to New Mexico, the woman sitting next to me put her face in her hands and wept. She lives in Alaska, and was heading back to New Mexico because her mother is seriously ill.

Aging has been doing its business to people forever, but when it's your turn to face it, it feels new and wrong. In the nursing home, a woman they told me used to be a teacher, screams periodically for no apparent reason. Sometimes she waves her arms and scolds someone who isn't present, "You put that down right now."

At lunch one day, a tall thin man told me he'd been to Bremerton. He had to say it several times before I could understand: "Pretty up there. All the water."

He said he had wanted to see more of the world, but his father died and he'd had to take over the farm. He said he enjoyed talking to me, that he had a lot to say, and if he could speak clearly he'd tell me more. He apologized for being so hard to understand. "I just can't talk."

If I were porcelain, I'd break.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.