Moves Bring On A Wave Of Emotions

Well into her 70s, Virginia Schomp’s mother, Ruth, kept busy. She delivered Meals on Wheels. She helped out at church. She was a born caregiver.

Then she turned 80 and suffered a series of health setbacks. Suddenly, she faced the prospect of someone taking care of her.

Not only might she be forced to leave her own home, but she also would have to give up the sense of independence she took for granted.

The change didn’t come easy.

“To go into a place alone, to leave the home that you’ve been in maybe your whole life and to uproot and be plunked down in a group of little old ladies is not for her,” Virginia Schomp says of her mother.

Although she’s careful not to pass herself off as an expert, Schomp is familiar with the problems associated with aging.

She collected, compiled and collated enough information to write a 426-page book about the subject called “The Aging Parent Handbook.”

Knowledge didn’t make the situation with her own mother any easier. The two of them visited several assisted living communities in their southwestern New York town, and Schomp’s mother “was shaky the whole way through.”

Who can blame her? While many wonderful options exist for today’s elders, any change in a person’s lifestyle can be profound.

And sometimes traumatic.

“The happiest people in assisted living are two types,” says Elizabeth Clemmer, a Washington, D.C.-based spokeswoman for the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).

“They’re the people who were in nursing homes, and assisted living is so much better that they’re ecstatic. And they’re the people who make their own decision to seek out assisted living.”

Ruth Schomp wasn’t ready to live in a place that completely redefined her.

“The thought of being in a place with old people who were helpless, who had no family to take care of them, was just terribly frightening,” Virginia Schomp says. “She didn’t want to be categorized that way.”

Meanwhile, the daughter felt caught in the middle.

“I have a young child,” she says. “You don’t have many free moments when you’re working and raising children, and those few moments you have left over, you’re using to take care of your parents.

“You worry. You feel guilty. You wish you could do more. And yet you can’t solve all the problems. You can never do enough.”

Guilt can have toxic effects, especially when child and parent trade roles.

“The quickest way to create a problem with anybody of any age is to assert that you’re now in charge and you’re going to completely change their whole way of life - thanks very much - because it’s for their own good,” says AARP’s Clemmer.

“Induced helplessness,” as she calls it, is a situation she encountered while visiting an assisted living community in Texas whose “sweet as can be” staff members “really came across as patronizing.”

How so? Well, when Clemmer asked why some residences didn’t have kitchenettes, a worker insisted that they were unnecessary.

“And I said, ‘What if somebody wants to get a soda out of their mini-refrigerator?’ And she said, ‘They shouldn’t be doing these things by themselves. That’s what we’re here for.’

“Well, yes and no,” Clemmer says. “It’s a luxury in a hotel to ring for room service. On the other hand, I would probably do without my cup of soup before I rang some buzzer at 2 in the morning.”

Spokane writer Gail Goeller discovered just how patronizing she was being when she suggested that her 88-year-old father move into the ground floor of his two-story home.

“I was concerned about him climbing stairs,” says Goeller, co-author with her husband of “The Complete Directory for Seniors and Their Families.”

“And he says to me, ‘But one of the ways that my body continues to work the way it does is for me to continue climbing stairs.”’

What’s clear is that decisions concerning adult care are complicated. Resolving matters requires that all family members be consulted before final decisions are made.

Above all, respect needs to be paid to individual feelings.

“With children, you think you know better,” Goeller says. “With parents, you don’t always know better.”

As for Ruth Schomp, she regained her health enough to return home. If nothing else, the experience allowed her to come to an agreement with her daughter.

“When the time comes, if it does, that she can’t live on her own, I have a room upstairs,” Virginia Schomp says. “And that’s where she will go.”

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