What do I Want? What do I Need?

What do I want? What do I need?
What do I want? I want a peaceful soul.
What do I need? I need a bigger gun.
Det. Charlie Crews, Life


Lately, I have asked myself these same questions and return to the same answers as Crews.

I have determined that the real issue with terminally ill grandparents isn’t dealing with impending death. No, the real issue with terminally ill grandparents is seeing your horrible terrible future. Not the horrible, terrible future of what your death can be like -they have OD’s of morphine for that. No, it is the horrible, terrible future whereby it occurs to you that you and your siblings needs to start talking about things now before your parents are in that place where they need help with activities of daily living.

Both of my grandfathers and my husband’s only remaining grandparent have died in the past five years. Shortly after my paternal grandfather died, my paternal grandmother was moved to a nursing home because she could no longer take care of herself. She has dementia and staying home alone without any supervision or regular visitors would not have been a good thing. My maternal grandmother has only recently gotten to the point she can no longer live alone.

What I see is the many ways denial, guilt, control, anger, grief, and unspoken expectations have made the situation even more difficult for all involved.

A lot of the arguments and feelings are leftovers from the fact that my parents lived overseas for 25 years. Not everyone agreed with their choices. Then when my parents retired, people continued to have expectations about what they would do or how they would behave to make up for 25 years of being “absentee” offspring and siblings.

I think what is most awful about the entire situation is that I see and experience how difficult it is to stop playing the role you grew up playing or expecting others to do the same. In our desire to control situations and others, we don’t allow them to change, mature or be who they want and need to be. If only they would do what we think they should do, then our lives would be better. If only they would do what I tell them to do, then things would be better.

Even more complicated is allowing jealousy and self-centeredness to rewrite the past. When jealousy, anger and self-centeredness writes our lives it is always from a place of never enough, making our world so small that it will barely contain one, much less anyone else who might care or want to.

I used to believe that my family would never be like the ones you see on t.v. on those talk shows. Now I am not so sure.

What I do know is that I have enough good memories of holidays with extended family together, of laughing, joking, talking, playing games and happiness that perhaps they will last for the rest of my life.

Still I desire a peaceful soul and sometimes wish I had a bigger gun.