Family gloom

[cosmolinguist]

Facebook tells me that four years ago today was the day my mom had the surgery to remove her tumor-ridden kidney. Yesterday she told me she's had news about slight deterioration of her other kidney.

It's not unexpected (indeed she's been actively expecting it at every checkup in the intervening four years -- including the time her kidney function actually got slightly better -- and this is the first time it's actually happened) and it's not too worrisome to her doctors yet, but my parents are taking it hard. Dialysis is a looming threat; "that would pretty much finish me off," she said to me on the phone today.

In other gloom news, she kept a cedar chest for both my brother and I, filling them with keepsakes all through our childhoods, and she says she wants to go through Chris's when I'm home in September (for my grandma's nintieth birthday party, which my parents are hosting which means I'll be even less likely to have any fun this week I'm there than usual) and mine at Christmas.

I imagine a lot of what she means by "go through" is "throw out," and I will be trying not to let her do that while also running up against the practicalities of having to fly back here. Usually I just bring a carry-on suitcase when I fly over on my own but I might bring the big one this time so I can chuck everything in it.

I don't really know what to do though. She said stuff like "You and Chris both got these pewter plates when you were born from [my paternal grandmother's sister and her husband who, childless and nearby, were like a third set of grandparents to my brother and me] with the date of your birth engraved on them..." She's mentioned these before and they're clearly important to her but I've literally never seen them in my life. They don't mean much to me. The people who gave them to us do, but they've been gone a very long time and being the sensitive, serious kid and especially teenager I was, I'd have rather seen the thing when I would have still more strongly associated them with the people who gave this to me. If I took them back with me I don't know what I'd do with them -- where would I keep them? would I ever look at them? what would it make me feel like when I did look at them, or if I didn't, and do I want to feel those things?

I think the question of how I wedge things invested with Boomer importance into a millennial household (and in a country with much smaller houses, at that) is going to get very pertinent to my life very quickly in the next few years.

My mom's conversation on my last trip home and sporadically since has been largely about how long they'll be able to keep living on the farm. She's clearly intimidated by the prospect of forty years of accumulated possessions... and what goes unspoken is that some of those things are still for the son who died or the daughter who moved so far away it wrecked their plans to give me the furniture and other things that were earmarked as mine. Or a few things kept in expectation of the kids my brother and I both failed to have.

Comments

[ewt]

I think the question of how I wedge things invested with Boomer importance into a millennial household (and in a country with much smaller houses, at that) is going to get very pertinent to my life very quickly in the next few years.

This is a very good turn of phrase that helps me put some of my own stuff in perspective -- not just the actual stuff but the expectations, too. Thank you for it.

I'm sorry about the difficulty of it all.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad it's useful. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but only recently (maybe just now, here, come to think of it) put words around.

When I visit or talk to people of this generation their houses are just so different, their priorities and expectations are so different, the ads in my WI magazine are for things I can't imagine ever being able to care about (like getting one's conservatory remodeled). Of course this was always the case when I was younger but I assumed I'd "grow into" those kinds of things, the way that lots else about me was expected to change into unrecognizable other things (like how we're supposed to get more conservative as we get older, a truism that definitely only applies to boomers because they're the only ones who've been able to accrue assets that conservatism exists to protect), and of course that hasn't happened -- the unrecognizable change in my life has all been away from those things I see in the previous generation, not getting me closer to them. There's nothing inevitable about it at all, it turns out.

[rmc28]

Tony was saying just this weekend that he felt he was getting MORE leftwing and radical the older he got.

I think my own shift has been from thinking about individual behaviour to system behaviour, and the limits of individual choice within awful systems.

[cosmolinguist]

I think I've been quite similar to you here. It horrifies me to think how much I used to believe that victims of bigotry could fix it with better attitudes and things like that.

[ivy]

Yes, this is me too... I've read a lot of increasing evidence about how it's very difficult for individuals to circumvent bad design, and the unintended consequences and unfairnesses of the social structures we build and which most people never think about. It's challenging, because a lot of it manages to be both boring and depressing at the same time, but if we don't tackle it, only people who don't have our best interests at heart will do so.

[davidgillon]

Tony was saying just this weekend that he felt he was getting MORE leftwing and radical the older he got.

That definitely describes me too.

I think my own shift has been from thinking about individual behaviour to system behaviour, and the limits of individual choice within awful systems.

Dealing with DWP, and Evil Aerospace before them, and seeing other people talk about dealing with the Home Office has really opened my eyes to the way we embed prejudice within our systems of governnment.

[rmc28]

Oh that is hard.

(I struggle myself with wanting to keep things but not knowing where to keep them.)

[cosmolinguist]

And it doesn't help that, thanks to immigration and other factors, hardly anything in my house is mine and it's already full of stuff. Trying to find homes for the things is already difficult and fraught.

[kaberett]

Oh gosh, that sounds like a lot <3

[cosmolinguist]

It feels like a lot. Thank you. <3

[brithistorian]

I remember reading an article about this a few months ago - apparently you're right in the middle of the spirit of the times. Good luck getting everything sorted out!

[cosmolinguist]

I think we younger Gen-Xers/older millenials (i.e. people in their 30s and 40s) have parents who've reached the age where they're more likely to be ill or sadly to die, and so there's probably a lot of people in the kind of position I'm in right now.

One thing I meant to put in this entry and forgot about was another thing my mom said on the phone: she'd been at a family reunion over the weekend and got talking to a relative about her age, who's lost her husband, about how hard it is to go through a houseful of stuff without him. I think they both found it useful to know they weren't the only ones thinking about these things.

[ludy]

Lots of Gentle Thoughts

One thing that i've learnt from my Mum being in Kidney Failure is how little kidney function a human body can cope reasonably well on. Mum had no real symptoms at 30% functioning (stage 3 kidney failure) and even in stage 4 it was very minor. They won't start dialysis until she gets below 15-10%.
The other very shiny thing is that by watching her diet and aggressively managing her blood pressure she's moved back from stage 4 to stage 3.
Hoping your Mum gets good care and reassurance and doesn't lose further function

[cosmolinguist]

I'm sure my mom's actual kidney will be fine for a whlie yet; what I'm worried about is the narrative. She's always thought of herself as someone hwo doesn't heal quickly/well, reacts to medications, generally has a more difficult time of it than other people around her.

And I think this adds to her pessimism about her kidney function. Like I told Andrew this afternoon when we were talking about it, either she'll be right and that'll suck for her a lot, or she'll be wrong and she'll spend the next thirty years telling us about how ill she is, that it's going to fail any minute now -- there's a lot of precedence for the latter among the women in my family!

I sorta worry that whatever actually happens with her health, it'll affect her actual quality of life really badly, if that makes sense? I think reassurance is the thing she's most in need of.

But I'm glad to hear your mum has been able to manage this as well as possible! Mine is already on meds to regulate blood pressure but I haven't heard anything about dietary stuff. I think feeling like there's nothing she can do about this but fret has not been good for my mom.

[sir_guinglain]

I am sorry for your mother having to consider the outcome of dialysis in the near future.

[ludy]

I understand this worry.
With my Mum it was quite useful that she's never bern very good at percentages. When she was told she had 30% kidney function she wasn't particularly bothered but when a different doctor restated it as a third of what it should be she freaked out!
I don't know to what extend it's helpful for your Mum to talk things through - or if it's better not to encourage her to think about it - but (barring stuff that could happen to anyone like accidents and severe infections) nothing is going to happen suddenly. Kidney Failure develops slowly and there's usually loads of warning/adjustment time before new treatments are needed.
My Dad found Mum a book of poetry from a writer who was treated at their local clinic and that seemed to help her but it's obviously a your-mileage-may-vary thing:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57464/notes-from-dialysis

More Thoughts for your Mum and for ypu

[alatefeline]

*hugs offered*

Yeah. That's ... really hard.

[worlds_of_smoke]

-hugs-

[davidgillon]

Friend of mine was on dialysis as long as I knew him. Literally had no kidneys, absolutely dependent on dialysis, but just treated it as a normal part of his life. Change soon becomes the new normal if you don't resist it, even if it seems an impossible hurdle at the start.

[cosmolinguist]

I have no doubt that there are people on dialysis that live full and happy lives, I'm just equally sure that my mom would not be one of them. She is not good at change. :)

More than that, though, it would also mean huge disruptions to my parents' lives, just because of how far they'd have to travel -- the hospital cloesst to them has lost almost all its services because it's owned by a bigger hospital that doesn't give a shit about the local area, so it'd be quite a trek for them to get to anywhere she could have dialysis. The complaints about long drives are becoming the most common ones relating to medical procedures for my family.

And like I said in another comment, I'm not so much concerned about actual dialysis as I am about the effect that having it loom over her is having on my mom's mental health and physical resilience.

[silveradept]

I am empathetic to the burdens you are carrying, physical and emotional, in working with aging parents. There's always so much stuff to deal with.

[cosmolinguist]

So much. And I'm still not done railing at the unfairness that I have to do it alone. It'd be so much easier if they had my brother nearby.

[benicek]

My parents' possessions also cause me anxiety. I can't afford free possessions because space is so expensive. I was tempted to give then that book about 'Swedish death cleaning'.

[sir_guinglain]

My failure to deal adequately with my stuff - all of which is being used or could potentially be put to use - is an ongoing problem for this flat. The transatlantic dimension would frustrate me deeply.

[nanila]

Looooads of sympathy. There is so much stuff that my parents want to give me and I'm like...how am I going to get it to the UK and where will I put it? Sell it now or give it to the charity shop. :/

[mtbc]

My mother especially collected all sorts of sentimental knick-knacks. I'm not the sort of person who looks back like that so after she passed I had the charity shop house clearance service take most of them away. Even then, the stuff we did take made our garage hard to move through or retrieve things from. We just don't have the room for that stuff, we already didn't have enough room before my parents died and I'm still offloading some of their stuff onto other relatives. Here's hoping that plenty of quality time yet can be gotten from your mother's remaining kidney function and that your parents make good use of it. If you want more than fits into suitcases it can always be mailed economy. I was glad that for some things I managed to get other relatives to take it so at least it went to somebody who cared.