Dad Said it Best
Age-Old Truths for Modern Times
“You can do anything you set your mind to.”
~Benjamin Franklin
Hello again! I am finally back to writing my blog, after an unannounced and unanticipated six-month hiatus.
It all started with a flurry of new responsibilities brought on by a couple of falls my 92-year-old mother took in her kitchen last winter. It resulted in several broken ribs, a broken hip and a blizzard of unanswered questions centering around causality, in-home care and future prospects for returning to independent living.
Long story short, I was consumed by my mother’s partial hip replacement surgery, hospital stay, nursing home rehab and in-home recovery for several months. I hovered over her to keep her from bending too much (stooping to pick up a crumb from the carpet or pulling wet laundry from the washer. I also didn’t want her to tempt another fainting spell due to her tendency to do “just one more thing” past the point of exhaustion.
But Mom never wavered in her steely determination to regain independence. It’s in her overachieving nature to push past expectations. And Dad always reinforced that tendency as a high virtue to pursue under any challenging circumstance.
“You can do anything you set your mind to,” he would say. And he’d expound on all the challenges Benjamin Franklin faced in his long, illustrious life to demonstrate how the author of that quote was speaking from experience.
Mom didn’t have Ben Franklin on her mind but she had certainly set her mind to regain any ground she had lost since her recent falls. She steadied herself with a walker and a cane for maybe two weeks around the house before she had me return them to storage for some time in the distant future “when I really need them,” she said.
She begrudgingly allowed me to have her bathroom outfitted with grab bars, a step-in cut-out for the tub, and shower curtains to replace her beloved sliding glass doors. She resented how long it took her to dress herself using the clothes grabbers and sock pull-on tools she was required to use while healing from surgery. But in each case, she chose to manage her personal care by herself, as painstaking as it was. All of these insulting inconveniences simply accumulated into more fuel for the fire in her belly. Mom was determined to regain her own life on her own terms.
At the same time, she initially enjoyed the attention of in-home care from me, my siblings and the various health care professionals who helped her rehabilitate. But soon, all the micromanaging got on her nerves. She wanted all of us out of her house. To her credit, Mom over-performed in every category, impressing the physical therapists, doctors and nursing staff with her refusal to take painkillers, and her insistence to walk independently and return to household chores, climbing stairs, shopping and gardening.
She much prefers the risks associated with hard-fought independence to the safety of being protected from her own impulses.
For most 90-somethings with osteoporosis, a series of broken bones, surgery, hospital stays and nursing home care usually spell the beginning of the end. But my fiercely independent mother never even whispered, “It’s curtains for me now.” She didn’t succumb to averages, assumptions or fatalism.
It has always been a matter of mind over matter for Mom. Whatever goal she determines, her body follows orders. As Dad always said, “You can do anything you set your mind to.”
