WHEN MY EIGHTY-YEAR-OLD FATHER died suddenly, my mother dealt with her grief by keeping busy. She joined a second book club, played more bridge, and intensified her community activities. Though it was hard to imagine her slowing down, I knew things would change as she aged. With my father gone, I appointed myself to look after Mom. I wanted to make the rest of her life the best it could possibly be.
I reasonably expected that this wouldn’t be too difficult. First, my mother had the resources to pay for whatever care she might need. Second, I worked in the field of hospice and palliative care, so I knew more than most people do about illness, aging, and our overly complex medical system. Third, I had a supportive sibling: my sister, Barbara.
It turned out that my rational expectations could not have been more wrong. Despite my many distinct advantages, caring for my mother as she declined both physically and mentally proved humbling. Emotions overwhelmed reason, and my professional knowledge paled next to my lack of real-world experience. My sister Barbara and I desperately wanted to do the right things for our mother, but we were never sure what the right things were. Every decision pitted Mom’s desire for independence against our fear for her safety on what I came to think of as the tightrope of aging.
After Mom died, I looked up from my head-down focus on her immediate needs and realized that most of my friends—and even strangers I talked to in line at the grocery store or coffee shop—were living through some version of this tightrope walk with aging parents. I also found that in sharing our stories, we were giving each other something we desperately needed: validation that caring for a parent is unwelcome and unfamiliar for all concerned.
I wrote Holding the Net to help as many people in this situation as possible. People with aging parents who want to know what to expect. People who cared for an elderly parent who died, and wonder whether they did it well. Even aging parents themselves, who want, as my mother so desperately wanted, not to be a burden to their children.
I cannot offer a foolproof recipe for helping a parent age with grace. In my experience, the ingredients are too human, and the healthcare system is too flawed. But when children willingly offer support—and when, even more rarely, parents willingly accept that support—there can be moments that feel perfect. That is where grace comes in.
To help you find more of those perfect moments, and better deal with the difficult ones, I have laid bare both my successes and my failures in caring for my mother. I have shared what I knew going in—or discovered along the way—about supportive living arrangements, healthcare services, medical decision-making, professionals you can turn to for help, and more. While I don’t have all the answers, you can learn from my experience, and may feel comforted to see that uncertainty and confusion are normal when caring for an aging parent.
Everything in this book is true, and told as I remember it. While some of the dialogue is improvised, all of it is based upon actual conversations or written communication. The people and places exist, and for most of them, I have used real names. In cases for which I wanted to protect an identity, names have been changed.
There are three people without whom this book would never have come to be: Andrea Askowitz, who provided encouragement on the first day of my first writing class, and made me believe I could be a writer; my sister, Barbara, who helped with research, provided insightful feedback on multiple versions of the text, and often guided me to the truth; and my husband, Klein, whose love and support are the warp and weft of my personal safety net.