My relationship with my dad is good, but we’ve never been great at having serious, important conversations. And now with his hearing difficulties and the communication & thought processing ups and downs thanks to Parkinson’s, those kinds of conversations are even harder.
That said, my father and I previously had a discussion about advance directives to make sure I knew his wishes if something sudden were to happen. As expected, he clearly didn’t want to suffer long term pain, nor be kept alive if his condition required extreme measures. With that out of the way, I felt like we were in good shape.
But over the past couple months, I realized I was having stress related to the balance of helping him enjoy the time he has vs making choices to extend life. For example, he really doesn’t eat well when left to his own choices. If I weren’t here to police him, he’d order fast food often and eat sweets constantly. Plus he’d probably drink whiskey every night.
But for me as his caretaker, that mix of wanting to make him happy but also make good choices for him was really weighing on me. Much like taking care of a child, you want to find the right balance. However, with an aging parent suffering from a progressive disease like Parkinson’s, the long-term decisions aren’t exactly the same. He will definitely decline over time, so where is the right balance of quality vs quantity when the remaining time is understood to be limited but unpredictable?
I decided to just outright ask him the other day by giving some hypotheticals. I asked a series of questions such as “If you could live another year by not having ice cream every night for dessert, would you want that?” Over that discussion it was clear to me that I shouldn’t stress and be proscriptive about diet and how he spends his time. He wants to enjoy his time and not hate his daily regimen.
He still definitely eats more healthily than he did prior to moving here, but I’m not going to force anything he doesn’t like to eat or be too strict on the desserts/snacks.
The other point of stress for me was that it wasn’t clear to me that he knows I would prefer working if possible, and that I’m giving up part of myself for this situation. I know it’s not about me and understand I chose this path. But he sometimes makes random little comments teasing ‘well, you don’t have to worry about that since you’re not working’ that would be extremely annoying to me. So I also brought that up and he understood and we cleared the air on that topic, so I feel better about things for now.