Moving your elderly parent can be easier said than done

CHICAGO – A friend is in the middle of the tense logistics of moving his elderly and ill father up from Florida to be near him. We talked about it – the process, the complexity, the inevitability – because I did the same with my mother.

And after the conversation, I found myself revisiting the experience.

It is one widely shared. My mother’s senior citizens’ residence is filled with people who moved there to be closer to their children. Several are parents of my friends.

But it isn’t an easy move. And the word “move” doesn’t seem quite right. It didn’t feel like a move to me; it felt like an evacuation.

My mother lived alone in New York; I am her only family. We had talked about what to do if she became unable to live alone. We had visited several assisted living facilities there and never taken it further.

But move to Chicago? She was a lifelong and fervent New Yorker. She wasn’t interested.

Until she fell, broke her shoulder and had to stay in a rehab facility for three months.

Where no matter how many weekends I flew in to visit, she was virtually alone.

And that was that. She could love New York all she wanted, but we both knew she had to move to Chicago.

And she had to move immediately.

I was desperate to fly her out before another medical emergency. What if she fell again or became too ill to travel? I pictured her trapped in a New York nursing home, with me trying to coordinate her care long distance.

We sold the apartment, I packed up her belongings and within weeks, she and I were on a plane. At age 93, she left New York.

My friend Amy remembers the same urgency.

Her mother lived in Kansas City and was losing her ability to speak due to primary progressive aphasia and starting to develop dementia. She had come to Chicago a few times to look at assisted living facilities with Amy but had turned them down.

“She was just absolutely opposed to it,” Amy said. “This was where her church was, where her clubs were.”

But it was also where danger was. When her mother started falling repeatedly and having trouble using an ATM, Amy and her two brothers held a conference call.

Their mother was no longer safe in Kansas City, she said. Her brothers agreed, one suggesting that they think about getting her out in the spring, some six months later.

“I said, ‘Have you not been listening to this conversation? We need her out next weekend,’ ” she said.

Within two months, she and her mother were on a plane to Chicago.

My friend Sara also feels the rush to get her mother out of her home. But she is seeing the other side of the parental move – the parent who refuses to make it.

Her mother, a widow, is determined to stay in her Bay Area home. Despite multiple health problems and frequent falls and broken bones, she has so far rejected her three children’s urgings that she move to Arizona, where Sara’s sister lives.

The siblings got her to move into an assisted living facility, but their mother has been turning down many of the care services it provides and has been hospitalized repeatedly.

“It’s just very challenging,” Sara said.

On the plus side, the situation has prompted some productive conversations with her own children.

“I’ve said, ‘Please call me on it if you see me being that stubborn. Remember, you have my permission,’ ” she said.

And so the parental move possibilities play out in all sorts of ways. There are no easy answers, no matter how common the question.

Amy’s mother did well in an assisted living residence near her home. She lived there for two years before she died.

“I was so grateful that she was here where I could monitor her care, because I was her medical power of attorney,” Amy said. Otherwise, “I don’t know how it would have worked out. She would have been in a nursing home.”

My mother mostly made her peace with her move here, where she is surrounded by lovely people in an apartment a few minutes from my house. Still, she mourned the life she left behind.

She has confided as much to my daughters – but never to me because, as one of them said, “she didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

It was a kindness on top of the one she had already done for me by moving here. She is 101 years old now; the thought of her living in New York is inconceivable.

Still, I took great delight a few years ago when her New York self reared up on a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago.

My mother was a member of the first class of volunteers at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, including a stint as editor of the education department’s newsletter. She volunteered there for more than 20 years.

Now as I wheeled her through the Art Institute’s modern wing, she sniffed haughtily.

“The best paintings are at MoMA,” she said.

That’s my New York mom.

Even in Chicago.