Sufferings of Aging

I mentioned in a previous post that I'd been reading the book A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents - and Ourselves by the New York Times writer Jane Gross. It's her story about taking care of her elderly mother as she declines over the last four years of her life. Her descriptions of those sufferings really made an impression on me and strengthened my renunciation and compassion.

Here's one example about getting to an MRI appointment, from early on:
Since her arthritis was worst in the morning, she had to rise at dawn and wait to dress until her joints had loosened. I’d go to her apartment and help her downstairs to the car, fold the walker and put it in the trunk, and then settle her into the front seat and fasten her seat belt, since she could no longer swivel from the shoulder and waist or manipulate the buckle. These were among my early lessons in how hard it is to be old — how long everything takes, how much some of it hurts, and how a caregiver must stop moving at warp speed and adapt to the pace of someone who is disabled, trying to make it all look natural and effortless.
I learned this much: Never shame your mother into rushing to keep up with you. First of all, it’s not nice. Second, both of you will have to cope with her broken hip if rushing leads to a fall.

A few years later her mother loses her ability to speak and then the ability to swallow, among many other losses. Gross's mother, Estelle, wasn't someone who wanted to be kept alive with things like feeding tubes; in fact, she had a risky surgery on her spine because she was hoping the operation would kill her, her family learned after the fact.

More excerpts:
p.268
My mother and I knew that, most likely, she'd missed the moment for a quick and easy passing. ... The reward for living this long, she often said, and studies support it, is that you get to "rot to death" rather than die. ... It was, she thought, the perfect trope for what happened to anyone who had the misfortune to need a nursing home or to have to pay someone to live with them at home, babysitter style, because they were too compromised to be alone. .... For someone of her nature, the long, slow, humiliating decline - mentally or physically - was unacceptable. ...

p.291
A doctor writes about his mother's fear of becoming "little more than a blank stare."

p.231
Helping our parents transition from total independence to partial or total dependence is a delicate balancing act that is impossible to do perfectly. Empathy, I would argue, is our best guide. While it may be impossible to escape the complicated feelings engendered by being thrust into a quasi-parental role toward one's parent, you can try to leaven those thoughts by considering how they feel about the same role reversal. The work, and ultimately grief, is ours, but the accretion of losses is theirs. They are giving up their independence, their physical or mental capacities, their pride, the role as head of the family, their spouses, and their friends. Their reward for longevity is often a wheelchair and diapers and being ordered around by their children. On the days when I wished I could run away from my responsibilities, I'd practice this mind game: If I can't bear one more day as my mother's mother, imagine how she feels. ...