So Far Away

Christine W. Hartmann

Description

Christine Hartmann's mother valued control above all else, yet one event appeared beyond her command: the timing of her own death. Not to be denied there either, two decades in advance Irmgard Hartmann chose the date on which to end her life. And her next step was to tell her daughter all about it. For twenty years, Irmgard maintained an unwavering goal, to commit suicide at age seventy. She managed her chronic hypertension, stayed healthy and active, and lived life to the fullest. Meanwhile, Christine fought desperately against the decision. When Irmgard wouldn't listen, the only way to remain part of her life was for Christine to swallow her mother's plans--hook, line, and sinker.

Christine's father, as it turned out, prepared too slowly for old age. Before he had made any decision, fate disabled him through a series of strokes. Confined to a nursing home, severely impaired by dementia and frustrated by his circumstances, his life epitomized the predicament her mother wanted to avoid.

So Far Away gives us an intimate view of a person interacting with and reacting to her parents at the ends of their lives. In a richly detailed, poignant story of family members' separate yet interwoven journeys, it underscores the complexities and opportunities that life presents each one of us.

Sujets

• Dying
• Caregiving
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Caregiver
• Gerontology
• Psychology
• Health
• Death

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826517975
• Langue: English

Extrait

So Far Away
A Daughter’s Memoir of Life, Loss, and Love
Christine W. Hartmann
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville










© 2011 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
ISBN 978-0-8265-1795-1 (cloth edition : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1796-8 (pbk. edition : alk. paper)
ISBN 987-0-8265-1797-5 : ebook
To Antje and Ron










Irmgard:
“I have always been scared of death. But now that I’ve decided I’m not going to leave that final event to chance, I feel much better. I can be in control of it, and this gives me a kind of inner peace nothing else can.”
“Wait. Please listen to me. I don’t want you to do it!”
“Oh, Tina, don’t get upset. You don’t have to worry about it now. The time when all this is going to happen is so far away. Let’s just forget I even told you.”













Hans:
“The time to start thinking about the last part of my life is still so far away. You know I am just starting up my new business. I’d be crazy to move out of this house for another ten or fifteen years, at least. I am too busy to think about retiring out in the countryside!”
Introduction: How Things Turn Out
Parents encourage or discourage, praise or scold, remain silent or yell, and yet despite these influences, children grow up to have their own unique quirks and personality traits. In part, we become who we are to protect ourselves from the people we love who can hurt us. I didn’t quite grow up the way my parents expected. But by their own admission, they didn’t fulfill all their parents’ expectations either. Neither did their parents … and so on.
My mother always wondered how she raised a daughter who enjoyed hugging so much. She never liked long embraces with anyone over the age of four. I could never get enough of them. I lived as a young adult in a very conservative rural area where physical affection was traditionally avoided, and I suffered severe withdrawal from lack of contact. I even took up martial arts as a hobby partially because it allowed me just to touch someone. Periodic sprains and fractures seemed a small price to pay.
It just goes to show that not everything turns out as planned. At least, that has been a central theme in my adult life. Nothing prepared me for the radical but methodical approach my mother took toward her own aging. Or not aging, which was actually her point. I’m not talking about plastic surgery to lift her chin or the daily consumption of a bowl of oat bran. She intended to implement a more aggressive strategy for dealing with the uncertainty of growing old. And I rebelled against her in an extraordinary battle of wills.
My father, on the other hand, always avoided setting a detailed agenda for his senior years. He lived in the moment, never looking far ahead, and we both anticipated his easy and pleasant retirement. But a series of sudden, apocalyptic events derailed his dream and both our lives.
My parents emigrated to the United States from Germany in the late 1950s. They met here, and my brother and I were born in Toledo, Ohio. Approximately ten years after they married, they divorced. Both entered their sixties in relatively good health, except that my mother had chronic high blood pressure and my father had high cholesterol.
The true story I tell here (I have sometimes changed names of individuals and locations) focuses on my parents as they neared the ends of their lives the time between 2003 and 2008. During these years my mother determinedly put in motion the plan she had hatched decades earlier, and I shouldered the burden of my father’s rapidly deteriorating life.
Despite describing my parents in detail, this book is chiefly a narrative about me. I originally intended to tell their tales, from their perspectives. I did not get far with that, before having to interject fiction, assumption, repetition, and sheer fantasy into the mix. So instead I recount here, in my own voice, what I know best: myself, and how I reacted to experiences my parents and I shared.
Our family issues in many respects mirror those faced by most people. We had our measure of dysfunction; each of us carried some emotional baggage passed down from previous generations; we grieved deeply and loved as best we could; and we feared losing each other and losing the structure of life that bound us together. If you identify with some elements of this story, be kind to yourself as you read.
Sometimes we think we know how things are going to turn out a drive to the grocery store, next year’s vacation, the book lying on the bedside table. They all seem so predictable. And having a predictable ending can make the entire process more enjoyable, or at least more comforting.
But sometimes the process itself, not the foreseeable consequences, sets the tone, allows for change, and provides new opportunities for growth. My parents’ final journeys were not easy, for them or for me. Yet each of us achieved a large measure of personal growth in the process, despite the suffering, and perhaps even because of it.
We all face permanent loss in our lives loss of parents, loss of other relatives, loss of close friends. The process wrenches our souls, but it also reveals them. In this book I tell a personal story, but I believe the lessons are collective. When the time comes to deal with inevitable loss, solace and companionship may be found within these pages.
Chapter 1 The Phone Call 2007, 2001
In October 2007, I came home from an early-afternoon bike ride through the colorful Massachusetts foliage to find a solitary new message on our answering machine. The red light blinked insistently at even intervals, and while I had planned to run to the bathroom after removing my helmet and bike shoes, I decided I’d better listen to the recording. Standing in the kitchen next to the machine, I couldn’t understand much of what the caller was saying, and I was tempted to delete the message as just another phone solicitation. I nevertheless pushed the repeat button and listened again: crackle, “I’m sorry,” murmur, “your daddy,” something incomprehensible, name of my father’s nursing home, blah, blah, “very sad,” something else incomprehensible, mumble, “call back.”
Okay, I thought, I don’t need to get every word to understand this. They never call me. “I’m sorry … your daddy … very sad.” I know what they’re trying to tell me. I scrambled to get my cell phone out of my pocket, then scrolled through the too-long contacts list. My father, Hans, is dead. I glanced up at the clock to remember the time. One thirty-eight in the afternoon. But wait. Why didn’t they call my cell phone after they realized no one was home? Those were the nursing home’s instructions: if something happened, they were to call me at home, then on my cell, then at work, then call Ron’s cell. With four numbers, they were almost certain to be able to reach one of us.
Hans’s nursing home was in Delaware, the state where he resided for most of his life. Until the beginning of 2007, Ron and I lived near Delaware as well. Then a change in my career brought us to Massachusetts. Rather than subject Hans to a grueling, disruptive move, the family chose to keep him near his friends and my brother. Nevertheless, I determined that the nursing home should always be able to reach me, because I had primary responsibility for his affairs.
I had emphasized the importance of having numerous ways to contact me because my father had specific orders on his chart: “Do not resuscitate. Do not hospitalize.” Despite these directives, when he had been found unresponsive at five in the morning the previous year by a nurse at Lovering Nursing Home, she had called 911 first and me second. By the time I spoke with her, an ambulance was already transporting my father to the emergency room. After that incident, I learned my lesson. I taped a large sheet of paper to the front of Hans’s chart. In all capitals it read, “DON’T CALL 911. CALL DAUGHTER.” Then it listed my numbers.
I finally came to the middle of the alphabet on my phone and found the nursing home’s listing. I pushed Send. As I waited for a connection, I felt strangely calm. I hope he didn’t suffer too much. But in any case his frustration and distress have ended.
A woman with a strong Jamaican accent answered the telephone. I told her my name, that I was Hans’s daughter, and that I had received a phone call from them. By the time I heard the first few words, “I’m so sorry to tell you that your father … ,” I had finished her sentence in my mind: is dead. To my shock, she concluded instead, “ … has been crying and screaming all morning. We thought that if you talked with him, you might be able to calm him down.”
Not what I had anticipated. Not even close. “Oh. Right. Sure,” I responded, fumbling for words. “I would be happy to talk with him.”
“Good. We’ll get him. Hold on.”
I had only a moment to pull my thoughts back from the abyss into which they had mistakenly jumped. It’s not over. And now I was standing in the kitchen really having to go to the bathr