Both this Helen and another Helen liked my grandmother's advice to the reader (who shall remain nameless) with the elderly mother. This Helen's own grandmother died last year and, in her last years of life, made things very difficult for Helen's mother. "The guilt thing was so true. I think daughters feel it worse than sons." Linda, so practical, says sharing a home with an elderly relative is "fraught". "The anguish of guilt", she counsels, might be avoided by putting in place an Enduring Power of Attorney for both care and assets while your relative is still mentally capable. Last year Jane and her husband moved into a retirement village, and cannot understand the ongoing "stigma regarding rest homes". "We did it because we did not want to become a burden to my wonderful children ... we did it when we wanted to and chose where we wanted to go ... it really has been the best decision we could have made ... Yes, we have had our life and I want my family to enjoy theirs. But we are still really enjoying ours, too. My family can never get hold of us." Val thought we all - me, my grandmother, nameless - had the issue around the wrong way, that it's important to support ageing parents "in a way they have some sense of control over".
"How would you feel if someone, like your children, came into your life now and decided they would tell you what you should do and where you should live and 'their' solutions for your life?"
I think none of us is wrong. That in the end it comes down to a point. A point at which we decide, whether ailing mother or guilty daughter, or indeed any among us negotiating life's path, to put ourselves first, that our own needs will take precedence over another's. I write those words and I writhe, for there is something inherently nauseating about talk of prioritising one's own wants, is there not? It smacks of the shoddiest of self-help books. Of bargain bin advice. And, worse still, typifies our modern obsession with self. To put oneself ahead of someone else is selfishness by any other name. And somehow selfishness has shed its mantle as one of the ugliest elements of the human condition, to become a virtue revered. We admire the mega-rich, overlooking their ill-gotten gains. We applaud the scheduling of me-time ahead of family time. Although that is not to say selflessness, selfishness' righteous sister, is necessarily preferable.
I am never attracted to the saintly, they seem too good to be true, and thus not to be wholly trusted.
In truth, few of us in Western society lead communal lives, our days no longer dictated by the vagaries of the weather and our village's needs. Our lives are busy and complex. And to move because your mother will not may be what tips you over the edge. So you choose self-preservation. Or perhaps you decide, for now at least, to put aside your own wishes and in doing so simplify your life in surprising ways. Life, both in the small and the daily, and in the major, course-changing stuff, can be overwhelming.
Possibly next week we might ponder this. I am open, as always, to your thoughts.
Megan.
