by Amal Awad
So it’s not surprising how matter-of-factly she speaks of caring for her ageing parents, both of whom are in their seventies. Not that her spiritual beliefs and adherence to Chinese medicine slip into her thinking. On her father’s diabetes, for example, she talks about the liver meridian. ‘When you’re a diabetic [the liver] gets impacted; the meridian stops at the liver and starts at the eye,’ she explains.
Patty lives alone, maintaining her professional life, and a personal one that’s separate to her responsibilities as daughter. ‘I feel very blessed, very lucky that this happened at this particular juncture in my professional life.’
But also, as she points out, there’s nobody else who can care for her parents. It’s Patty who has the capacity to be the helper. Capacity more than patience, she emphasises. ‘It doesn’t drain me. It’s not upsetting. I still get a chance to spend time with my family. It doesn’t stretch my patience. But I have to say, I’m not a patient person by nature. I’m very quick thinking, I’m a very pragmatic person. One of my flaws is that I’m highly intolerant, but this doesn’t stretch my patience.’
I know enough about Patty to agree – having worked with her on my own personal journey. She’s the take-no-prisoners, no-nonsense, keep-it-real type. But I also wonder if there was a defining moment when she realised, like I did, that a new reality was forming. That the coordinates were shifting and life was transitioning into something unfamiliar.
‘The one defining moment was that I stopped getting shocked when something would happen with my parents’ health. When it first starts happening it sends a bit of a jolt of shock in your system. “Oh my god, oh my god,” – because it’s so unusual. Then I got to the stage where I just went, this is actually going to be normal, so I have to stop getting shocked about it. Not necessarily expect that they’re going to die any second, but I have to be realistic that this is my life at the moment, and stop sending stress into my nervous system. When I made that decision, that’s when I stopped getting impacted. I think what impacts us as people is the element of shock.’
I had been thinking about this very realisation earlier. How I used to assume Dad would go back to ‘normal’ following a hospital visit. But now I am no longer looking for a way out of it. I’m existing in it.
I’m subscribed to Patty’s private Facebook group, a following interested in self-improvement to whom she sends out messages of encouragement. Patty is often wise and funny, and very generous in doling out spiritual comforts. She has told me more than once that I need to accept the new reality of my life. But more than that – to not expect more from a person than they can give, or are willing to give.
‘I think – and I don’t know if it’s a Buddhist philosophy or an ancient Yogic philosophy – that the greatest cause of suffering is the desire for things to be different,’ says Patty. ‘And I certainly know from my own personal experiences in the past, where I’ve moved through difficult transitions both personally and professionally, I amplified my own sense of suffering by constantly wishing that things were different.’
Patty says she no longer succumbs to this instinct. ‘It’s not that I accept I can’t change things, but with certain things I just accept them as they are because then I’m not constantly wishing. I don’t plug into something that’s intangible, like, if only he were better then this wouldn’t happen.’
Moreover, she makes a pertinent point about personalities. ‘I see my dad dealing, or maybe a lack thereof in terms of dealing, as a simple extension of his personality. So it’s not like he’s vastly different. They’re exactly the same people and they’re dealing or not dealing with it, just like they dealt with or didn’t deal with life’s ups and downs previously.’
I am reminded of a similar realisation of my own: that my father has two competing sides, never in alignment. The old Dad I have known my whole life is there, but he’s competing with new Dad, the one who struggles to understand the rapid, uncontrollable unravelling of his life. They don’t always get along; it’s like he’s fighting himself. Preferring to sink than swim. Is it always Yin and Yang? Two selves that battle it out?
Then I have to remind myself that he’s not simply my father – he has his own identity, story, needs and desires.
Friday
On Fridays, I become a collector of memories. A story-keeper. These wandering conversations, like excavations, shift things in all of us.
My mother, Samia, was born in Jenin in 1951, when the city was part of Jordan. But her passport says Arrabeh, the town in which my father grew up. An error made by a worker at the citizenship office in Australia, who didn’t want to change it. ‘What’s the difference?’ he asked my mother.
‘Sometimes I want to scratch it out and replace it,’ she tells me.
‘Why does it bother you so much?’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.’
Another day, Mum puts it simply: ‘I love Jenin.’
My mother moved to Kuwait at the age of fifteen; she was married a few years later to my father, who had been living in Australia for two years before returning to the Middle East to find his bride.
My mother’s memories of her early years in Sydney are razor-sharp, her commentary acerbic and, at times, loaded with regret. Her grievances are understandable given the settings and circumstances. A stranger in a foreign land, without her family, without friends, piecing together fragments of a new language by watching television. My parents arrived literally without a single Australian dollar to their name (the Jordanian currency would take months to exchange, via London). Kind airport staff enlisted the assistance of a stranger to give them a lift – in a limousine no less. Mum recalls her introduction to cheese on toast; the Anglo-Australian couple she and Dad shared a flat with for a year and a half. She remembers the woman’s name – Jenny. She says she wishes she could thank her. ‘She was my dearest Jenny.’
Mum took on work in Australia a few days after her arrival, despite a lack of English, wrapping ice creams in a factory assembly line (where she paid 20 cents for a home-cooked hot lunch, like stuffed chicken and vegetables). Her second job was as a seamstress, employed by two old Greek ladies. She got sacked when she was too pregnant. (It wasn’t planned.) Before that, for eight to twelve dollars a week, because she wasn’t yet twenty-one, she sewed buttons on clothing. Underpaid in a foreign country, learning the language by watching television, connecting to her dearest Jenny while Dad took on more than one job, and a portion of their earnings went overseas to support my uncle, Dad’s younger brother, in his university studies.
I knew my father’s story but in patches; anecdotes shared along the way, emotional remembrances of his time in Germany in 1963, the first country he migrated to when he left his town in Palestine, the recollections of which seem to have shifted over the years.
Dad can rattle off the name of every German town he lived and worked in, tales of strangers he encountered who provided assistance, how these moments of kismet shaped his experiences of loneliness and solitude. But tonally there is a deeper resonance, one drenched in the reality of isolation, the fear that came with the new, particularly in a country where the language, culture and people were all foreign.
Dad thought, in fact, that he had made a mistake upon first arriving in Germany. ‘It was very, very hard.’
But he grew stronger. He found work, which helped him settle a bit. Immigrants congregate and ghettoise, and this was true for my father to an extent. He recalls with emotion how fate landed him in the right place in Germany – a town called Speyer – just as he was ready to give up, to be taken under the wings of other Palestinian men who were a bit older and familiar with their new home.
But to understand my father as he is now, it helps to have knowledge of the effort he’s put into achievement and living a full life, one that has seen him attract much love and praise from friends, customers, even the waiters at the local café. In fact, it’s interesting how individually my father has lived. He worked hard to support his fami
ly, but it was my mother who was present, who raised us.
As a child, living in the small mountainous town of Arrabeh, disconnected from the rest of the world, on the cusp of conflict, my father dreamed big. He was an ordinary student, achieving pass grades in school. But there was no limit to his imagination and potential, and in his final year of high school he concocted a plan to travel beyond the borders he’d known his entire life.
Upon sharing his plans to leave Palestine, my grandfather –a severe, brusque man – expressed doubt. ‘My father used to say, “How are you going to survive?”’ Dad tells us. ‘I said, “No, Dad, you should think about me in a positive way.” He always put me down.’
It was June 1963. Dad obtained a passport, then a visa to get him out of Jordan into Syria. ‘I took care of it all myself. My father didn’t know, I only told my mother.’
Dad replays the conversation that bewildered his loving and dedicated mother: ‘I have to leave very, very soon.’
‘You want to go? Where?’ came the alarmed response.
‘Germany.’
His mother reported this to his father.
I ask Dad why he wanted to leave so urgently, and he explains that he felt an immense amount of pressure. Were he to stay in Arrabeh, his future would have been limited to teaching or farming, neither of which appealed to the wanderlust in him.
‘I was dreaming about Canada,’ he recalls. ‘I applied for Canada and Germany.’
Later, he had to choose between Canada and Australia, the latter of which he picked upon advice from a friend. ‘Australia is a pot of gold,’ he advised my father. Another man instructed my grandfather not to let his son move to Canada. Its weather was intolerable – ‘It’s freezing. Don’t even think about it.’
My father recounts his departure from Arrabeh with tempered emotion. There he stood in the street outside his father’s home, my grandfather calling out to God. ‘I’ve tried everything to stop him and it’s not in my hands.’
Dad tears up as he recounts this. ‘He tried to get me into higher education or to open a shop. I said no. I was very determined to leave.’ His inner workings, hidden for so long, perhaps even hidden from himself. My father is like many people in this world who strive not only for purpose, but also acceptance from others. For Dad, his father’s approval held significant weight. ‘I wanted my father to be proud of me,’ he says, simply.
Eventually he would be.
A person, not a person and patient
When I meet with Patty, I admit to her that, in general, I’ve switched off. I feel things, yet somehow I also feel detached, like I’m untethered and at any moment could float away. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism.
‘People respond very differently to illness,’ says Patty. ‘Some are very “I can beat this.” Some are very “This has beaten me.” I think that irrespective of which spectrum your parent is in, it’s important not to wish something different for them than what they want for themselves.
‘Meet them where they’re at because it’s more respectful. The amount of times my dad has been told to cut out drinking and smoking and he’s resorted to trying to hide it or to lie about it, bless his cotton socks. He’s got the good sense to self-medicate, and that’s how I see it as well. I just think, well, he’s not going to take organic wheat-grass shots at this time. He’s not going to go on a vegan diet. He’s not going to make himself smoothies. I think what’s also helped me is just meeting him where he’s at, so that when he does leave, he’ll leave feeling content and full of what he wanted, not necessarily what I imposed on him.’
That Patty talks about her father lying and hiding indiscretions isn’t surprising: many carers share similar experiences. My own father seems to wrestle with the truth of his situation at times. I don’t think he lies to us; I’m just not convinced he is always seeing the truth for himself.
And so many others have told me stories like this: parents who are getting older, but they know how to get their own way. They will obfuscate; ‘forget’ appointments; sit in denial when something becomes difficult; outright lie about when the aged care worker is coming over; insist that the worker not work – just talk. They want company – no need to vacuum, just sit down and chat. Isolation is a killer. One woman I speak to, Carla*, who used to be an aged care worker, felt conflicted: she had a job to do, but she also appreciated the client’s craving for human company. If Carla was lucky, she would have time to make her client a cup of tea. She says they always had a cache of good stories to tell. Deep, and sometimes dark, histories they wanted preserved or passed on. One woman, Carla told me, spoke about her parents putting her on a train to flee a conflict zone during World War Two. Some of the older women I met with, who lived alone but had full lives, reflected wistfully on their experiences as females in a world centred on men. They had their stories to tell for the sake of posterity, too.
Patty’s insight offered a fresh and useful perspective.
‘It’s not about me, nor is it about what I want,’ she emphasises. An important point, given how badly we feel when someone close to us is affected by illness. How desperately we try to fix it all, offering opinions and advice.
Yes, advice. Don’t be a know-it-all because you’ve spoken to a few people, read a few books and listened to doctors on Conversations with Richard Fidler. I might feel like a counsellor, but I’m not one. I don’t want to be militant, hounding Dad every time I see him. You can read an article or two but what do you know, really?
But it’s hope, I realise. Every possible solution is a moment of hope. We become experts in solutions that don’t apply to us because we are invested in the outcome and we think we see things more clearly, unaffected, not so emotional.
‘Sometimes it’s important to think about your family member away from their illness,’ says Candace*, a registered nurse. ‘It’s really nice to have that dedicated time where you’re just sitting with them; just having that time with your dad, having that bonding. Because I think often you can get really hung up in worrying about how effective the treatment is, and what’s going to happen in the long term. But it’s nice to feel that you can just be with him.’
‘And they just want a normal day,’ adds Diane*, her colleague.
I’m getting better at seeing Dad as a person, not a person and patient. I’m better at reminding myself, when I look at him and my mother, that ‘I’m not going to let you feel this every moment of the day.’
Sometimes being there is about knowing when to pull back. I like Patty’s advice to ‘meet them where they’re at’. It resonates, it’s practical, it’s fair, even when life feels completely unfair. ‘I meet them with no judgement, with my perspective that isn’t imposed on them, with my views and values that are respectfully exchanged, without compromising my own personal integrity.’
But surely – capacity, empathy and patience aside –challenges lie in this? Like where they’ve wanted something of you and you’re unwilling to offer it? I am thinking of all the times my father wants to do something impractical and, despite my advice against it, insists, and I, not wishing to upset him, give in.
Patty says she chooses her battles. ‘I don’t walk on eggshells, but also I’ve seen a different facet of my parents, because their capacity to tolerate chaos has diminished significantly as their health has.’
My close friend Marcela has similarly described a shift in intensity. She has spoken to me of her father’s limitless love for food and wine, a bountiful table being core to the family’s Chilean culture. But she hopes that her father will some day come to sufficiently appreciate the gravity of his situation to abstain from indulgent treats. And she’s acknowledged a reshaped relationship between two very similar characters – feisty, stubborn, headstrong. Neither can ever win the argument. He was very much the father, but as his health ebbs away, there are changes both to the life he knows and the way she relates to him.
‘My dad was always the man to turn to when you were in trouble, as was my grandfather. He’s
overseas, but they were very similar in that sense. Between those two, nothing could ever touch you. To have them both on my side, it was like I was invincible.’
Marcela got along well with her grandfather but she and her father clashed a lot. But he’s not well now, and the dynamic has shifted. ‘I let him get away with it. I wouldn’t get into those arguments with him again. It turns around a little bit. You become the parent and they become the children, right?’
It affects us all, this gradual, or sudden, role swap. Em*, a healthcare support worker who provides at-home services to the elderly, offered an important perspective on cognitive and physical decline. ‘It’s said that when people get old, they start regressing into being children. However, from what I can gather and understand, if you have a child, you’re feeding the child with knowledge and doing things. When you have an adult that’s losing it, and you’re taking more things away from them, you’re not feeding them. You’re actually making them feel worse.’
This deprivation leads to apathy, he says. ‘So they’ll go, “Why should I get out of my pyjamas? I’m not going anywhere. Why should I shave? Why should I shower?”’
Em is fifty-eight, and working in home services for the elderly is a world away from his previous life in the finance industry. He says it’s eye-opening. His observations are sobering.
‘People have said to me, “Jeez, it must be very rewarding.” And [the first time it happened] I had to sit back and think about that for a few days, actually … to see how I was going to respond to that question next time. And the response is, from where I came from, yes, it’s rewarding to see people succeed and do well in their health and all that. But what’s rewarding about watching people die, being disabled, continually going to see doctors, and watching their life deteriorate right in front of their eyes? And then watching their family trying to cope with it all. So, is there anything rewarding about it? No.’
