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My father turns seventy this year, and my mother has survived breast cancer. While they are both still vigorous enough to chase grandkids around for an entire day, their aging is becoming a more frequent topic of discussion among our family. During one conversation about their eventual plans to move to a retirement home and possible need for nursing care, I must have looked bewildered. "What's wrong?" my father asked. "Oh, Valerie still doesn't think you and Ruth are going to die," my husband chimed in—not unkindly, but (my apologies) dead right. Youth's parents are, apparently, as immortal as youth itself.
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For thirtysomethings like me, not yet the meat of the sandwich generation but no longer the bottom slice of bread either, Virginia Stem Owens' new book, Caring for Mother: A Daughter's Long Goodbye, is a possibly unwelcome but valuable portent of things to come. An unflinching account of Owens' seven years spent caring for her mother, who suffered from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, Caring for Mother reads like a map of the territory we may be about to enter. If aging is indeed "Another Country," as the title of psychologist Mary Pipher's book on aging suggests, then caregiving for the elderly is like hiking alongside our loved ones in a foreign land. Death is certain, Owens writes, but the process of dying is an "open, anxious space where we set up camp, uncertain how long we'll be there."
Owens' story begins when her mother is suffering from Parkinson's but is still mostly lucid and living at home. Gradually, however, her hallucinations increase in frequency, and Owens grapples with how to respond to her mother's conviction that men have broken into their attic and that tar is seeping through the floor. Recognizing the gravity of the situation, Owens moves into a house down the street from her parents and spends the next seven years taking her parents to doctors' appointments and helping her mother move into a nursing home, where she lives for five more years. Accompanying her mother as she slowly drifts into a semi-dream state, Owens ponders topics such as the medical establishment, caregiver fatigue, nursing home culture, brain chemistry, and Eastern and Western understandings of the self.
Caring for Mother is, in a word, relentless. Owens is unfailingly honest about the agony of watching her mother lose her faculties, her own frequent sense of failure and guilt, and her floundering faith in a gracious God. She does not shield herself or her readers from the anguish of a parent's decline with Christian platitudes about heaven or the virtue of a life well-lived; indeed, she quashes the notion that spiritual fortitude or lifelong practices of faith will necessarily carry a person into tranquil twilight years. At the end of her life, Owens' mother found no comfort in the faith that once sustained her, and she became displeased by any mention of religion. Owens tries repeatedly to help her mother recover her belief, to "find the switch that can flip on that steadfast faith she had always relied on." In a heartrending scene toward the end of the book, Owens' mother has a panic attack at the imminence of her death. Gripping her daughter's hand, she says, "I don't want to go away from you." Owens is speechless and can only stroke her mother's arm, "abashed to discover she loves me more than God."
Before reading Caring for Mother, I assumed that the serenity that characterizes my own grandmother, who will turn 100 later this year, was bought with the countless hours she has spent throughout life in prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual attentiveness. She's the archetypal "prayer warrior," that most cherished of Christian images of aging: the grandmother who spends hours praying for the struggling great-grandson, the overworked pastor, the granddaughter with three small children who lives an hour's drive from family (that would be me). It seems that for some people, a lifetime's stockpile of spiritual resources can be cashed in for peace at the end of life. But Alzheimer's, which has been called "the theological disease" because it ravages memory and identity, can deplete even the most saintly Christian's spiritual capital.
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