The Aging of my Parents-in-law

 

   (I missed my monthly posting here for August; been quite busy.) 

   Tuk's parents are extremely aged and steadily failing in health.  The circumstances of our caring for them has been drastically altered in the last month. 

   Father-in-law is 92 and weakening at an alarming rate.  Tuk got him to the hospital due to breathing problems, and he was in ICU for a while.  His decline in strength has been over several years, but accelerating recently. 

   Father's communication – at least with me – has been in similar decline.  Many years ago, I could carry on a limited but good conversation with him.  In the last couple of years, our verbal communication has broken down.  I still give him a respectful wai salute the first time we make eye contact each and every day, as I have since the first day I met him.  I will place my hand on his shoulder, and he will look at me with a smile and a silent laugh.  No words from him.  Now, he can barely open his eyes. 

   I wish so much that I could talk with him about his lifelong immersion in Buddhism, about his take on living in this world of Dukkha (i.e., what the early Buddhists in China had called "this Great Matter of Birth and Death"), and about his thoughts on his coming death. 

   He will never return home from the hospital.  We are not physically able to care for him at home, since he is completely bedridden.  Tuk was there with him most of the days and nights during his ICU stay at the private hospital, and now we have had to transfer him to a government hospital for basic end-of-life care.  Tuk visits him twice a day during the midday and evening visiting hours.  He is slowly fading, going gently into that Good Night. 

   Mother-in-law has been spiraling down into more helplessness due to her Alzheimer's dementia.  Brother-in-law has taken her to his home, caring for her there with some help.  She is extremely thin and fragile, fading. 

   Their generation is passing on.  Time:  what an unfathomable attribute of entities!  (Wasn't it Aristotle who said that Time is a kind of "measurement of motion"?)  We are all moving through Time, in one direction.  Dukkha. 

-Zenwind. 

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