This Is Us
The Pain of the L.L. Bean Catalog
My aging parents have hijacked the simple pleasures.
It’s been a rough few weeks, shoved into a rough few years. I know everyone else has experienced the same dumpster fire world for years, and I know that wanting to throw myself off a cliff after two years of taking care of my elderly parents is overly dramatic, privileged, weak. But that’s where I’m at. I guess I’m also ending sentences with prepositions now, which tells you a lot.
My parents sort of planned for old-age, but not really. They bought long-term care insurance, paid off their house, and had a decent amount of savings, but they didn’t make any decisions. They just let themselves slowly decline, together, in a house that they let fall apart. When my father’s Parkinson’s got so bad that he was pushing himself around the house in a desk chair, they still made no decisions.
When I asked my mother how she let my father get so bad, so undignified, she looked at me coolly and said “he’s an adult.” I burst into tears and screamed something like “well then what is marriage for?” Then I went outside and threw up into the strawberry plants, holding on to the railing of the new wheelchair ramp I had installed in a panic. My father was passed out in a living room chair at the time, the mucous in his mouth showing, which made me throw up more.
I always intellectually knew that depressed people don’t mobilize, don’t make any decisions, and just let the world wash over them. But it wasn’t until I saw the descent of my parents, life-long, albeit undiagnosed, depressives (who were made for each other in that way), that I actually understood it. I don’t know what they would have done if I hadn’t stepped in, but I think about it all the time.
Would my dad be stuck in that armchair with swollen legs, snoring with his mouth open? Would my mother’s dementia get worse and worse until she lit the house on fire, because she couldn’t shuffle to the stove in time? Now I ask my father this question all the time. “You would be so fucked without me” I often say when I’m frustrated that I can’t find a password to an account (ask me about how banks refuse perfectly executed power of attorney documents), and he just says “that’s true.” Sometimes I have a weird fantasy about what would happen to them if I got hit by a truck.
Growing up it wasn’t quite this bad, but there were hints. I once spilled syrup on the den carpeting, leaving a dark sticky mess, and they just never did anything about it. (To be fair, about a decade later they replaced the carpet). My mother always dressed like a total slob, and made some vague excuse about it based on her own version of feminism I never really understood: she never worked, relied on my father for everything, and never bothered to understand our finances. But ask her to wipe the lipstick off her teeth and she would snap something about not having to look good to meet society’s expectations.
So I wasn’t really surprised when I went back home in July of 2020, after getting one too many calls from the emergency room due to my father’s falls, to see how bad it had gotten. I wasn’t surprised, but I had still held out hope — even in middle age — that my parents were different people. I hoped that I was wrong about them, that they wouldn’t just continue to amoeba their way through life. But they are in fact human amoebas. There is some liberation in finally recognizing this, and quashing any hope that they aren’t. I no longer pretend that my parents are who I always wanted them to be.
After a month of harried research into what do you do with an 85 year-old-with advanced Parkinson’s (at-home, under the table care? at-home, prohibitively expensive above-board care? A board and care facility? An assisted living facility?) I finally chose a nice assisted living facility for my Dad. I wheeled him into the creamy building, designed to look like a California mission, while he was slumped in the new wheelchair I had miraculously gotten through Medicare (which is hard, by the way). I assumed that he would be dead within six months.
Meanwhile, if had any doubt about my mother’s hard-heartedness — which I could never prove to anyone else because of her charm and wit — it was removed when my father asked if we were going to rent their home to pay for assisted living. My mother snapped back “where am I going to live?” And my father asked sadly “you aren’t coming with me?” It’s hard to describe what happened to my insides after I saw my father’s shock that his wife wouldn’t go with him. I was broken open, flattened. Even though I knew my mother didn’t care about anyone else but herself, I couldn’t stop hoping that she would someday start.
But the world has a way of righting itself, and after a few months in the assisted living facility, away from my mother, my father started to thrive. He met a 92-year-old named Thelma, who yelled at me to “send us a nice Cabernet!” when I visited. He started going to exercise class and crushing trivia night. His new meds made him more alert, and he finally said about my mother “you weren’t imagining it — you got a raw deal kid.”
My Dad’s new lease on life eased the pain of my mother’s cruelty. But Dad’s thriving means that we are going to run out of money. Now I lie in bed every night, furiously tap-tap-tapping at the iPhone’s calculator app, trying to figure out how many months of money we have left. It consistently spits back the same answer: 35 months. Then I furiously google the life expectancy of an 87-year-old with advanced Parkinson’s, and an 82 year old with vascular dementia, and the Internet suddenly becomes a pretty chirpy, positive place: Parkinson’s patients live just as long a anyone else! Vascular dementia patients can get better!
I can’t figure out how to find the medical expert who will tell me what I want to hear, that one of them will die before we run out of money. When I confide this to my friends, I get shamed. “Adeline!” they say in mock horror, “that’s terrible! You don’t mean that.” Oh, but I do. These people haven’t started paying for their aging parents, but they are in for a shock when they do. Of course, I can’t say this to them. People don’t like to hear that they inevitably walking into a financial buzzsaw. So I say nothing, feeling sorry for myself that no one understands that death is preferable to a cheap board-and-care, paid for my Medicaid, or whatever happens when you run out of money, because despite all my research, I have no idea what actually happens when you run out of money.
As my father thrived, my mother got worse. Her cognitive abilities slid at a precipitous rate, although it’s hard to tell whether her new inappropriate behavior is a result of diminished brain function or the fact that she’s just a terrible person. Recently, I tried to get her into the same assisted living facility as my father (sorry Dad) but they wanted to lock her up in the memory care ward, a jail for people with dementia. For some unknown reason, I went to the mat for her and fought to keep her out. I locked horns with the executive director of the facility, and we are still battling. “See, you do love your mother,” my friend Valentina said, triumphant. “No,” I said evenly, “I just don’t think human beings should be locked up.”
It was after the argument with the executive director that I reached some sort of tipping point. I now take a benzodiazepine practically every night (ask me about the subtle differences between Alprazolam and Lorazepam!) and chase it with a fistful of mini chocolate peanut butter cups, or See’s Candies Butterscotch Squares. I’ve stopped exercising. No more swimming, or yoga, or big hikes. Or any hikes. No more taking Fish on epic walks — I’ve hired someone to do that now — because every moment I’m not dealing with my parents’ trash lives, or at work, I’m staring at terrible television, high on a benzo, begging Fish to come cuddle with me. I just can’t do anything else.
My house is a mess; stacked with files and documents my parents saved, dating back all the way to the 1970s. Documents that now come my way about their current care are tossed on top of other documents. Emails from the pharmacy get buried by other emails about long-term care; I’ve almost used up all my Google storage. I’ve started to save cardboard boxes for some unknown reason, stacking them in the corner of the dining room. My dining room table has a little pieces of paper with incomprehensible notes scribbled on them, perhaps from when I was high on benzos. Somehow to my left there is a stack of Windex electronic wipes, no doubt put there when I had some high-as-a-kite ambition to clean all my devices, which of course I don’t have the energy to do.
It was against this backdrop that I pulled out the L.L. Bean catalog from my overstuffed mailbox. There’s a couple on the front, walking in a backyard, with the sun setting behind them. No biggie, but I lost it. When was the last time I was in a backyard? My parents backyard, with its dying crabgrass and cracked, dry dirt doesn’t count. When I had a horse here in Los Angeles, I complained about how tired I was of taking care of him after work, but now I would give my kingdom to touch a horse’s velvet nose. Admittedly, I’ve been to the beach over the last two years, and on hikes, but somehow in this very moment — while I fight to keep my mother out of dementia jail, and constantly have numbers swimming in my head — it feels like that life is over. I’m not sure how to get it back.
I berate myself for not appreciating moments of my past life, all the dinners outside, all the days looking at tidepools, the days when I was covered in hay and dirt, the days of walking through farmers markets, excited to experiment with whatever was in season. I’ve stepped through a sliding door away from that life, and the L.L. Bean catalog is just an errant artifact from a lost era. I’m not going to need any L.L. Bean duck boots or camping gear, because my life is now just a combination of benzos, the iPhone calculator app, bad television and chocolate and L.L. Bean is definitely not selling that.
But I want to claw my way back, out of this strange prison. My friend Eliza invited me to a lake recently, and I told her I couldn’t go because I was doing yet another thing for my mother. But the truth is that I’m afraid to go, because I know I won’t be able to stop thinking about iPhone calculator. Rather than submerging myself in the water and enjoying the sunshine, I’ll be thinking about mortality rate of people with Parkinson’s.
The couple on the cover of the L.L. Bean catalog are not thinking about the iPhone calculator. And this is why I am drawn in. Sure, L.L. Bean sells well-made silk underwear and great slippers, but what they really sell is a life free from rumination, free from fathers choking on their own mucous in an armchair, free from mothers who abandon their husbands and children.
And so yesterday, I did something strange. I went to the L.L. Bean website and looked for jobs. I had a vague idea that I could move to their headquarters in Freeport, Maine, work in a retail store and escape all of this. And while that’s obviously delusional, it did feel like a tiny, baby step to getting out of this vortex. Maybe next week I’ll even go outside.
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