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Maybe she didn’t and he doesn’t want to get better.

As I left the skilled rehabilitation nursing facility where my dad is currently, I could feel my blood pressure rise, and the frustrating tears burst through into sobs that I could not control for the next several minutes. Again, I left, with him refusing to wear his BiPAP. It is the machine that keeps him from being readmitted to the hospital by shedding a buildup of CO2 from his body. I felt like I was almost about to have a heart attack or a stroke. I’m not exaggerating one bit. I knew I had to calm myself down. I called two good girlfriends but got both their voicemails. I asked Siri to text a coworker who is going through just about the same thing as me. I didn’t send it. I am glad they didn’t answer because if they had, I would not have had to come to a possible realization a few minutes later.

‘Maybe they didn’t/don’t want to get better.’

The other day, my brother told me, “Stop trying to save Dad.” I thought, I am not trying to save him, I am trying to help him save himself. I had the same exact thought with my mom a few years before she passed. If I just worked a little harder and could get them active, if I just learned a little more and then tried to explain the benefits of a healthier lifestyle, if I just tried to help them help themselves, then they would be happier and around longer. I simply could not understand why two parents in their early and late seventies wouldn’t want to get healthier, not only for their own sake but for the sake of their children and grandchildren. Why would they want to put their children through the ringer because they could not get their lifestyles in order? Their vice? Food. But I am starting to see now that a lifetime of their own experiences, especially early childhood, shaped their later years. They both grew up in difficult households.

My momma was fierce and BEAUTIFUL. Yet she struggled with her weight. My dad is sweet and is a charmer, but can’t charm his way out of his own failing health.

My mother’s father up and left her and her three younger siblings when my mom was twelve. My grandmother, her mother, could not cope, and my mom could not understand why her dad left, to never return. And digging the knife even deeper, he moved to Florida and remarried someone with children. My mom never had weight issues until her father left, and those weight and self-image issues plagued her for life. But she always instilled in us girls that we were beautiful and enough.

As for my dad, back in 1947, my grandmother gave birth to him at forty years old, and my grandfather was 55 years old. My dad’s siblings were quite a bit older than he was. Twenty years between him and his oldest sibling, and eight years between him and his next closest in age. My dad always said it was like growing up with grandparents instead of parents. Especially true when it came to his dad. Money was not abundant, and that, I believe, is why my dad doesn’t do so well with certain things. He never wanted to be ‘without” as an adult, so he wasn’t. Even if it meant overindulging in the food arena. He always has. (He has never mentioned going hungry as a child.)

But how did they get to their seventies and not learn how to love themselves enough to take proper care of their bodies? They ALWAYS made sure we kids were fit, active and had a healthy self-esteem. My mom used to say, “You kids got chubby AFTER you left home.”

But here I sit now, in the living room of my childhood, where I have been living for the past six years, helping my dad with my mom, and after she passed, helping my dad with his grief. And what I just realized in this moment is that as I sit here being mad at them for not taking care of themselves, is that I am not taking care of myself because I was/am consumed with taking care of them.

Maybe their life experiences didn’t prepare them for their later years, and therefore, they could not figure out how to be healthy because they were not given the tools from the start. I WAS given, by my parents, the foundation and all the tools to live a healthy life.

So maybe it’s not, they didn’t want to get better because I know they did/do. Maybe I need to stop trying to convince them to change for the better and see it as a lesson.

I cannot take care of them in the ways in which they want(ed), if I am not healthy enough to even take care of myself.

I have been very lost these past six years. So lost that I couldn’t see my own shadow. But tonight I had the realization that I put me back on the trail.

Like all good parents, my parents gave their children a better life, more than they had.

~L