Bringing up Father, or, the Reluctant Gerontologist

How I turned a family role, thrust upon me by circumstance, into a career

by Jacqueline Majanlahti, Complete Geriatric Care

he following is both both a cautionary and a salutary tale. It is humorous now — although it didn’t seem so at the time — and I hope readers will find points of recognition in it.

When my mother died at the early age of sixty in 1970, my parents had been married for thirty-one years. Theirs had been a super-traditional marriage — he provided the sperm, she the offspring’s upbringing.
When he became widowed, my father continued to maintain the same lifestyle he had enjoyed for the past 8 years, those being the years that he had not looked after my mother, who had had to have a leg amputated above the knee due to thrombosis and arteriosclerosis.

During those years, he usually went to the pub on the way home from the office, seldom ate supper at home with her, and moved out of the conjugal bed into a room of his own. She was relatively mobile with her artificial leg, but had difficulty negotiating the steps up into the bungalow in which they lived, and could not even get out to go grocery shopping.

During these years I was a young married woman with two children. My priorities were to look after my own family as well as try to keep my mother company, take her to her medical appointments, get her to the tune-up shop for her artificial leg, and generally cheer her up. However, keeping my father on the straight and narrow following her death was quite beyond me.

About a year after my mother’s death, Father went to live with my brother in Halifax, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But the honeymoon was short, and after a year my brother was transferred back to Montreal, where he refused to house my father any longer. Father then moved in with my younger brother at his urging. My younger brother clearly had not laid sufficient ground work for the project: not only did his wife promptly leave him over it, but he also set up a rigid system of rules which Father refused to follow. Ultimately, father moved into his own apartment downtown and got a job.

Time to “do my time”

Father had a slight stroke in 1978, which had no visible aftereffects, but which made me feel guilty that I had not yet “done my time”. This seemed the moment to ask him to come for an extended visit so I could fatten him up and observe him. When he came for his visit, I introduced him to all the neighbours and friends, who just loved him. So he stayed, and he stayed until 1989, through two of my marriage separations and two arterial replacement surgeries of his own. We renovated the basement to make an adequate living area for him, and eventually moved to a larger house in the same area.

Vituperative comments

Bringing up Father is never easy, but my father presented rather more of a challenge than many I have known. His habits were less than socially acceptable, and he provided an extremely negative role model to my children. His innate selfishness prevented him from attempting to fit in with such routines of the household as mealtimes, or, when he did, from eating without vituperative comments about the food. He slept late, stayed in his dressing gown until late afternoon (when he would switch from tea to beer), burnt electric kettles dry, and would never share the newspaper until he had completely finished with it. He was an unrepentantly bigoted man, and frequently commented on my or the children’s friends, current news items, or on the editorial leanings of the Globe and Mail in thoroughly derogatory ways which my children would not tolerate. When he was not making inflammatory comments he spoke very little, except for answering “how are you” with such original responses as “all the better for seeing you, my dear”, or “no harm comes to steady men”. He embarrassed the children to no end by requesting restaurant bills “l’addition, s’il vous plaît”—in our favourite Japanese and Chinese establishments.

Twice he made a pilgrimage to England to see it for the last time. Each time I was on tenterhooks as to whether he or those around him would survive the expedition. He would happily get waited on hand and foot by his sister in Manchester, even though she was older and more infirm than he was. This was her womanly role.

Never again to hold up our heads>

On his last trip to England, he traveled back on the plane with my sister-in-law’s mother, Betty, who was a very proper woman in her late eighties. One would think that a traveling companion would do him good, but instead he drank so much that he suffered fecal incontinence, and was literally a stinking mess when he disembarked. Our shame would have been bad enough just getting him through the airport and into the car, but to display this tragedy to Betty was to suffer the pains of the damned. Never again would we be able to pretend to hold up our heads at family gatherings.

My marriage ends

In mute rage, I continued to care for him, do his laundry, cook his meals, taxi him home from the bar each evening to eat, and end all my activities to coincide with his needs, all the while trying to encourage my children to treat him with respect and kindness.

Not surprisingly my marriage ended, and a year later I went on a camping holiday for a week. During that week, my younger brother came to Toronto and visited my father. He decided that I was neglecting him, that Father was depressed and ill nourished, and that he needed to come back to Montreal for a visit. This he did, and when I got home from my holiday, I told my brother that I thought it was his turn to keep our father, as I had done 11 years of duty without any help, and I was having a hard enough time managing my life as it was.

My father was very upset at this turn of events, and shortly afterwards rented a room in an apartment conveniently located just up the street from the Legion. There he continued to live quite nicely until he fell on his way home from the Legion one evening six years later and died at the age of 87.

Patience and tolerance are supreme qualities when working with the frail elderly and in spite of myself I seem to have developed them to a degree. Perhaps I managed to expiate my anger when my father left my house after those 11 long years, and then when he finally died I had come to terms with it all.

When my husband and I finally divorced, I was already in a job in a long term care facility, educating staff on how to treat the elderly and infirm, and had been doing the job for 3 whole months. I had no formal training and my newly completed post-graduate degree was in History and English, but the company director felt that I would be excellent for the job because of my personality, my presentation skills, and because I had been looking after my father for all those years while simultaneously running a household, bringing up my children, and doing two McJobs to support my education habit. The most important fact was my ability to manage time and people successfully, and maintain my aged parent. Never mind that I was not a nurse or had never been inside a nursing home. As an adult educator in long term care, I attended many workshops and seminars becoming well educated in the field of gerontology, the very last choice I would normally have made given my relationship with my father. But it came in handy when the time came for me to become economically independent.

What it all means

So here’s the message: all experience in life is grist for the mill, and offers opportunities for learning and growing. Even when you think what you are doing is getting you nowhere and is not successful, something good may come of it. I remember thinking this when, in 1981, I applied to be assistant to the Director of Rehabilitation at St. Mike’s. My experience helping my mother with stump care, tendon stretching exercise, and gait training with her prosthesis, all counted at the interview.

Now I’m wondering what my early life experience at vocal training and amateur theatrics might bring me. Perhaps this could introduce me to yet another career.

Who knows?

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