Archives: September 2011

A lawsuit in B.C. involving a mother who wants her adult children to support
her financially is raising questions about whether Canada still needs laws that
obligate children to support their parents.

Shirley Anderson, 73, is suing four of her children, asking that they each
provide her with $750 a month.

The children, who are now all grown, claim they don’t owe their mother
anything because she abandoned them when they were teens. more

This morning, I stumbled upon this piece by Dr. Jordan Grumet.  In the midst of random blurbs about heart caths, med schools, and social media on kevinmd.com, lies this poetic jewel tracing a physician’s day that balances the end of life, the beginning of life, and the race of life alongside one’s son.

As he stands at the bedside of a fellow young father, his patient, who takes his last breath, he thinks of these words of John Donne:

“Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee”

We definitely need more physicians with sensitive souls who strive to relieve suffering not only for the sake of that individual but also because when anyone suffers, we all suffer.

And the more children, the better!

Compared with fathers of five or more children, married men with no children had a 21% increased risk of cardiovascular death, according to the study published online in Human Reproduction.

I have a new piece up at The Huffington Post on hospice care that was inspired by a dinner I recently had with the CEO of the hospice where I serve.  She has served in hospice care for over 20 years and I am amazed that we still face challenges and opportunities even she has never faced.

One challenge our area continues to face is the aging and dying of individuals who were evacuees of Katrina.  The stress that many of their families have absorbed in the past 6 years has created people with frayed coping systems.  I am amazed at the ways that the professional hospice team members have become masters at re-direction.  When people are stressed they tend to get angry and upset over something that is not really the issue.  It takes a great deal of patience and inner resolve to stand in the face of someone cursing you and respond with a calm, “Why don’t you tell me how you got here?”  Story is a great deflective device that humanizes the person yelling at you and allows that person to re-contextualize and to some extent, come to their senses.

I am reminded of the baby advice books that tell you that when your infant is crying and screaming, you must hold them close, walk slowly, speak or sing very quietly and breathe deeply and slowly.  This is very hard.

“I have a friend whose wife suffers from Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t even recognize him anymore, and, as you can imagine, the marriage has been rough. My friend has gotten bitter at God for allowing his wife to be in that condition, and now he’s started seeing another woman. He says that he should be allowed to see other people because his wife as he knows her is gone … I’m not quite sure what to tell him.”

Many of you probably already know how Pat Robertson responded to this call-in question which was to say that the husband should divorce his wife who is “already dead” with Alzheimer’s in order to avoid the sin of adultery.  Of course, there has been much hub-bub about Pat Robertson’s recommendation to a spouse to do so. Several responses caught my eye:

Pastor Lynn Casteel Harper, ordained in the Baptist Church and a retirement community chaplain, responds at the Huffington Post.  She notes that Robertson is clearly uncomfortable with giving an answer, though he forges ahead anyway, and that he should be uncomfortable because dementia forces us to ponder the reality and meaning of absence:

“What we must stare squarely in the face is absence: the absence of sequential memory, the absence of logical conclusions, the absence of control. Absence is scary. It leaves us feeling vulnerable, so, in an attempt to alleviate our fears, we fill the absence with answers (“you should get a divorce,” “you shouldn’t get a divorce,” etc.).

The primary offense is not necessarily the answer Robertson gave but that an answer was offered at all, that the complexities of the situation were reduced down to a debate about whether the man in question should or should not get a divorce. The dilemmas presented by dementia, however, transcend narrow moral quibbling. Rather they call us to grapple for meaning and meaningful relationships in the shadowy realms of absence and finitude.”

As a species, we tend to be uncomfortable with absence and finitude and change in general.

Paula Span, in “The New Old Age Blog” reflects on the divorce option from the perspective of the caregiving child:

“And caregiving children lack the divorce option — they can’t replace an ailing parent with a more cognitively intact model. Even when words vanish, their loved one’s ability to smile or squeeze a clasped hand, or perhaps their own sense of duty, rewards them.”

Absence, change, the question of what makes a relationship worth keeping…

I then turned to this week’s issue of Time magazine and read an article on “Latchkey Parents” that highlights a newish trend in divorce, where divorcing couples leave the house to the kids and they take turns living one at a time in the home.  An Ontario judge comments that this practice of “nesting” allows divorcing couples to avoid

“treating children like Frisbees.”

The article, for the most part, is positive except for some comments from a law professor who thinks that this arrangement will deter children from moving on and “building a relationship with each parent independently.”  However, the close of the article is almost perfect:

“…nesting offers insights that parents can’t get anywhere else, especially about what it’s like to shuttle between houses.  So when kids find they left one shoe and half their homework at the other parent’s home, they can empathize.”

I would argue, and I think Marquardt’s Between Two Worlds would concur, that the burden of divorce and the sacrifices of physically moving that divorce will demand should lie on the parents not just so they can empathize with their kids but because they are the parents for goodness sake.

Being a grown-up in relationship is hard.  The people we love may change, may never change, may leave, may stick around forever, and even divorce, which does not negate a relationship.  Change and absence and sacrifice may be the side dishes to the entrée of relationship.

Caring for a loved one who leaves a relationship through choice or disease is a complicated and often heart-breaking journey that requires a far more nuanced answer than divorce and start over.  Come on, Mr. Robertson, grow up.

Today’s People section of the newspaper highlighted an article on the potential stinginess of Boomers in bestowing an inheritance.  Titled, “Boomer Children Can’t Count on Inheritance,” (and I thought I loved a play on words!), Walter Hamilton draws out the high points of a recent survey completed by US Trust of millionaire boomers.

The article shows that less than half of the millionaire boomers surveyed feel that its important to leave money to their children when they die.  Not surprisingly, this statistic was a bit upsetting to a company devoted to helping people bequeath their money!  The CEO of US Trust is quoted as saying,

“We were like, ‘Wow.”

As often happens in interviews, I imagine that CEO Keith Banks said many eloquent and knowledgeable quotes concerning his deep analysis of this data and is now chagrined to see that they quoted is 13-year-old daughter.

Overall, the analysis breaks down into three camps:

1) Some boomers watched Dead Poet’s Society recently and are fully carpe dieming it. They say that they are going to go on that long-dreamed of vacation now, drink the good wine now.  They deserve it.

2) Some boomers have watched Chris Farley or Adam Sandler movies lately, and they feel that their kids don’t deserve the money because they have either already bailed them out several times or paid for expensive educations or

“1/4 of boomers worry that their children will become lazy and 1 in 5 fear that the kids will squander the money…more than half of the respondents haven’t told their children how much their worth.”

3) And lastly, many boomers watch too much ER or Grey’s Anatomy and are fearful that they will outlive their savings, especially when they consider the rising costs of health care.

“The concerns are legitimate, financial advisors say, because boomers have longer life expectancies that their parents but fewer safety nets such as a pension to guarantee financial security.”

Thought-provoking data, although I just kept wondering, ‘How do I become a millionaire boomer?”