67% of adult children caring for their parents also work full time, and 22 million households in the U.S. care for an elderly adult. An Associated Press reporter reflects on how his Wabash education helped him live one of the stories behind this sobering statistic.
The call from Atlanta made me feel helpless.
“It’s your mom. She says her stomach really hurts. She is lying on the bed, moaning,” my wife, Lorena, said, more worried than I’d ever heard her.
It was August 2011 and I was in Washington, DC, for a few days of training and to visit the Saudi Arabian embassy. I had just accepted a job as the Associated Press bureau chief for Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the kind of position I had been striving for since I joined the AP in 2002. My mom had come to visit us for a few weeks before returning home to Eugene, OR to begin her 40th year teaching at Lane Community College. In October, my wife and I would move with the kids to Riyadh for my three-year assignment.
But the urgency in Lorena’s voice gave me a strange sensation that things were about to change.
At the hospital, the surgeon, a round man with huge hands, explained that mom had suffered a stomach perforation. They had to operate. I asked for other options; while relatively young at 70, Mom had diabetes and heart disease, which made surgery much riskier.
“No,” he said. “If we don’t operate, she will die of sepsis.”
It was the easiest decision I’d make for the next 12 months.
I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN I FIRST HEART IT, but one of the many things from my four years at Wabash that has stuck with me is the College’s mission statement: “Think critically, act responsibly, lead effectively, and live humanely.”
While I can’t recall much of the academic material I learned at Wabash, I am who I am today in large part because I was pushed to think critically in every class, expected to act responsibly at every moment, shown how to lead effectively by Coach Gail Pebworth and many great professors and older fraternity brothers, and thanks to all of this, subconsciously decided there was no way to live but humanely.
Facing Mom’s crisis, I prayed that she would survive. I asked for the strength and wisdom to handle whatever happened. But I would learn over the next several months that faith is not always enough. I was going to have to make hard decisions for my mom and for my family, and nothing was a better tool to help sort through it all than the condensed version of that mission statement that rang in my head: “Think critically, act humanely.”
"YOUR MOM IS STABLE, she survived the surgery, but we were not able to get her off the ventilator,” the surgeon told me.
For the next two weeks Mom didn’t open her eyes, didn’t respond when I spoke to her or held her hand. Her only movement came from the ventilator blasting air into her chest every few seconds.
Most days, I felt like I had already lost her.
Many decisions were looming. Even if Mom survived, her life would never be the same. She probably couldn’t work again or live on her own, and although she had yet to open her eyes, the bills were already starting to pile up.
Armed with power of attorney, over the next few months I would launch a fundamental rewriting of her life. I retired her to lock in her pension to have money for all the bills and switched her insurance to a Medicare Advantage plan. I consolidated her bank accounts and dealt with the Social Security Administration.
I sold her vacation home on the Oregon coast; she always wanted a place on the ocean and had only owned it a few years, but I couldn’t justify the monthly costs amid the storm of bills.
I hired a close childhood friend to clear out her house —the house where my brothers and I grew up—so I could put it on the market. I also put on notice my older brother, who had recently divorced and was living at the house rent-free.
“You are putting your own brother on the street,” he screamed during one of several arguments about it, this one on Christmas Day.
“Nate, I’m sorry,” I said. “I just have to get out from underneath all these bills. I can help you pay a month or two of rent somewhere, but ultimately the house has to go.”
I was becoming the decision-maker in the family while the person I most needed to talk to was incapacitated and unable to speak. The woman who had taught me to be bold and chase my dreams was fighting for her life.
I told AP’s international and Mideast editors what had happened, and I couldn’t have asked for more compassionate responses. Still, they wanted to know: Would I take the job? And if I did, when could they expect me to start?
MOM BEGAN TO IMPROVE A MONTH after her surgery. I felt new hope that she would recover, that we had more chapters to write together.
Drawing back from the brink of crisis allowed me to believe I could still take the assignment in Saudi Arabia.
The job was the culmination of 10 years’ work. This was the fourth time I had applied for an AP position in the Middle East; the stars had finally aligned.
I had studied Arabic at UCLA while married and juggling 50-hour workweeks. When we moved to Atlanta in 2008 I found an Iraqi tutor and continued to study, taking my oldest son with me to Arabic tutoring sessions and reading him children’s books in Arabic.
My break came during the Arab Spring in early 2011, when I volunteered to do a month-long stint in Egypt. The story gave me a chance to show the bosses there what I brought to the table. A few months later, I was offered the Saudi Arabia bureau chief position.
Mom’s situation aside, this was a good time to go for my family—the kids were young, so we didn’t have to worry about schools.
Mom had pushed me to go after the job. So much of what we shared, so much of what she taught me growing up, was a zest for adventures and world travel. One of her favorite phrases was: “The only trips I’ve ever regretted were those I didn’t take.”
In one of our first conversations after the tracheotomy tube was removed, she urged me to go.
I presented a timeline to the bosses; I would start in four months. That gave me time to make sure Mom was on more solid footing, time to move her either to a nursing home in Eugene, or perhaps to Los Angeles, where she had two brothers and two sisters.
THE RESIDENTS SAT IN WHEELCHAIRS in the halls, hunched over, sometimes drooling. The stench of urine made me cover my nose.
I had traveled to Los Angeles for two days to look at potential nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Before that moment, it seemed like a good idea. She would be close to family and I could fly in every three months to spend a week with her.
But the assisted-living and nursing homes were either extremely expensive—more than $10,000 a month—or rundown places where the residents lived in squalor. Some were both.
What’s more, mom’s siblings were cool to the idea of having her in LA. It was a bitter lesson: In moments of crisis, some people, even family, sort of hide, hoping to avoid having to take on any extra responsibility.
So we decided to move Mom to Eugene, where she had lived most of her life, had close friends, and a beloved bridge club. My brothers also lived in Oregon, although, while they loved Mom deeply, they were all bogged down with their own problems. All three had spent time in jail, and one had substance abuse problems. They were not in a position to make hard decisions, and giving them access to our mom’s funds could leave her broke and in a Medicaid facility.
Still, as long as I kept control of her money, Eugene was a solution. One of Mom’s long-time friends, a person I trusted, agreed to take on medical power of attorney in case any medical decisions needed to be made before I go home from Riyadh.
I sat down on the couch and tried to breathe deeply. I was having chest pains again.
It had been three months since Mom’s surgery. While most days I felt like I was handling everything okay, I also had moments where the pressure of it all—Mom’s precarious health, managing her life and finances, my job, the needs of my young kids (who often didn’t sleep through the night), and trying to plan both Mom’s move to Eugene and our move to Riyadh—felt like it was killing me.
And there were complications I hadn’t anticipated. Despite much therapy, Mom couldn’t stand up or walk. Months of being bed-ridden had atrophied her muscles and she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Her body would shake uncontrollably as she lay in bed.
Of course, if she couldn’t walk, she couldn’t get on a plane, and I couldn’t move her to Eugene. I looked into air ambulances. They were about $30,000. I couldn’t help but ask myself: If Mom is in such bad shape that you can only move her like that, how can you leave her?
While still loaded up on painkillers and often forgetful and easily confused, my mom had recovered enough that we could discuss all this.
“God will help us,” she told me.
THIS TIME THE CALL CAME FROM the nursing home: “Your mom is having trouble breathing, so we are sending her back to the hospital.”
When I arrived at the ICU, a doctor came in and explained that they’d found large clots in Mom’s legs and right lung. The next 48 hours would be critical, he said. There was a chance she would survive, but also a strong possibility that she would not.
I felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs. I held my mom’s hand and looked into her eyes. I saw something I had never seen in her: fear.
“Just a bump in the road, Mom,” I told her, trying to convince myself, as well. “Just a bump in the road.”
Within 24 hours she improved enough to be moved to a regular hospital floor. Then, about 10 minutes into a conversation we were having, her demeanor suddenly changed. She wasn’t engaged; she just gazed into space.
“Mom, are you doing okay,” I said while standing in front of her.
She nodded, but couldn’t say anything. I walked briskly to the nurses’ station and explained what I had seen. Minutes passed before a nurse came in. She sauntered around Mom’s bed as if she were kicking the tires on a used car.
“The monitors show her vitals are fine,” she said.
“But look,” I insisted. “The way she is acting isn’t normal.”
“Are you okay?” the nurse asked Mom, who nodded her head while continuing to look dazed. The nurse looked at me as if to say, “See, no problem.”
“No,” I said, now shouting. “Something is wrong.”
I ran out to find the doctor assigned to the floor and, when we returned, Mom was even less responsive.
“Can you hear me?” the doctor asked while shaking her shoulder. No response.
He pulled out his cell phone and told the person on the other end that this was a “full-code event.”
Sirens wailed. The light in the hallway was blinking. I was pushed out of the way by several doctors and nurses who frantically loaded things into the IVs in my mom’s arms and got a ventilator in her mouth.
I stepped out of the room and hunched over. As a journalist I had seen a lot of death, especially in Haiti. But I just couldn’t watch this.
A few minutes later, a doctor came out and told me Mom had been stabilized. “We are not sure what happened,” the doctor said. “Maybe a stroke or a heart attack.”
I went back into the ICU, held Mom’s hand and rubbed her forehead.
“Thanks for being a great parent,” I told her, looking through tears from her blank face to the monitors.
WITHIN FOUR DAYS, Mom was awake, though it would be another week before the ventilator would be removed.
“I made a decision,” I told her a few days later. “I’m not going to Saudi Arabia.”
She shook her head, and her eyes filled with tears.
“I already told the bosses,” I said. “Lorena and I want to be here with you. This is where we belong.”
It had been hard for me to let go of the job, but somehow it no longer mattered. I wanted to be there for my mom, whether she had only a few weeks left or a few years, and I couldn’t carry for another day the stress of trying to plan for that job on top of managing everything else.
So often “think critically” and “act humanely” had felt like yin and yang to me—opposites that competed to be my guide. This time, though, they were the same: After this latest setback, it would be a long time before I could safely move my mom to Eugene. And there was no way I could leave her in Atlanta, where she had no family or friends.
“This was God telling us, ‘Come on, guys. What were you thinking?’’’ Lorena said.
In the months since that day, we’ve seen little miracles. Mom stood up in late January, and with the help of a walker, began to take steps. In July she moved to an assisted-living facility, something none of her doctors and nurses—nor I—thought she would ever be able to do.
Her health is still fragile, and everything that happened last year has left her life permanently altered, as well as our relationship: Today we are negotiating the difficult transition of a child becoming the parent. Getting old is tough, not only for the ailing person, but also for their family.
Everyday I think a little about what might have been had we gone to Saudi Arabia, and I have yet to return to Arabic study since all this happened. Somehow I just can’t do it right now.
But every day I’m so thankful I made the decision I did. Every moment with my mom is a gift, and I have no doubt that taking a stand, being at her side during such a dark period, has made a huge difference in helping her survive and recover as much as she has.
This last year has taught me so much about life, but nothing more important than this: When it comes to tough decisions, I will always combine my brain and heart—“think critically, act humanely.”
But in the end, the heart must always lead.
Peter Prengaman is the All-Formats Editor for the Southern United States at The Associated Press in Atlanta.
