Tough calls lead to plenty of guilt
Most days, the guilt taps her on the shoulder. Some days it slaps her in the face.
“It stops life sometimes,” Sheila Loosemore said.
Earlier this month, Loosemore’s 95-year-old mother, NavaJo Sizemore, fell in their home, breaking her clavicle and five ribs. She was transported to a long-term care facility. She will likely never return home.
“Most likely for the rest of her life,” Loosemore told me. “I feel so guilty. I can’t sleep. I’m secondguessing my decision.”
Loosemore was her mother’s sole caregiver for the last seven years. No other family is around. This decision was all hers.
“My mother says she is all right with this, but I have not been able to see her, to look at her, to know one way or the other,” Loosemore said. “It would help if my mother just said it was all right with her. She has not. She cries when I call and asks to come home, then I cry.”
Her mother suffers from dementia.
“My mother will forget what we talked about in an hour, but I don’t,” said Loosemore, who’s 67. “It affects my entire day. I know this is the right decision for her, and for me, yet I feel so guilty.”
This poignant scenario is becoming increasingly common for adult children whose elderly parents have become too much to handle. It doesn’t matter if the parent is living on their own or with their child. At some point, something happens — a serious fall, a grave illness, COVID-19 — and the family’s emotional house of cards topples down.
“We understand that someday we will be called upon to care for them, to be patient with them. But for how long and to what degree?” Loosemore asked.
Sizemore and her late husband, a medic during World War II, were both born in Kentucky. She came into the world through the back hills of the Bluegrass state, weighing less than three pounds, her daughter said. A midwife placed heated rocks around her tiny body to keep it warm. “Yet she survived and was healthy most of her life,” Loosemore recalled.
Sizemore and her husband were married in 1943, before he left for boot camp. They moved to Gary in 1946 so he could work with a fellow soldier as a dental technician. In 1973, they moved to rural DeMotte, living on Sandy Pines golf course. Sizemore never learned how to drive, so a golf cart got her around.
“She loves the game of golf and to this day that’s her best topic of conversation,” Loosemore said. “I hated the game. Probably because she loved it.”
Sizemore’s husband died in 2000. Fourteen years later, she moved into her daughter’s home. It hasn’t been a time capsule of rose-colored rainbows and warm memories.
“She can be demanding, unforgiving, judgmental and, in general, unpleasant,” Loosemore said. “Not only that but she hates that I don’t do this or do that. She has good points. They are just hard to see sometimes.”
Loosemore feels guilty nonetheless for placing her mother into a topnotch facility near their home in Connersville.
“Even though I really didn’t know her growing up and never felt close to her, I am the only one left to care for her,” said Loosemore, a 1971 graduate of Gary Lew Wallace High School. “My parents were distant. My mother was mostly not home. I always felt that she didn’t see me. But she is still my mother.”
In her head, Loosemore knows that her mom is where she needs to be. In her heart, she feels anguish and remorse.
“All my friends tell me it’s OK to place her there, to let someone else care for her. They tell me it’s time for me to enjoy my life,” she said. “But all I feel is sadness.”
Her mother cries every night before she goes to sleep, praying that God will take her to his kingdom in heaven to join her husband, two other children and a grandson, Loosemore said. Not to mention all
the friends she has lost in life. Sizemore doesn’t understand why she is still alive, at 95, and newborn babies die for no reason.
“She does have her soft points,” Loosemore said.
Sizemore could be a stubborn, self-centered woman, her daughter recalled. She never attended Loosemore’s school events, softball games or bowling tournaments. Nor her grandchildren’s activities.
“Yet here I am feeling guilty because she isn’t in my home, under my care,” Loosemore said. “I have searched my conscience to make certain I have not placed her in that nursing home for retaliation for her absence through my youth and beyond. I am sure beyond all that, this is for her own good.”
This fact hasn’t stopped the tapping on her shoulder or slap to her face. However, it has shaken her enough to glance to the future when she may be in her mother’s situation.
“I hope when the time comes … I will recognize the burden I have become. And I will help my caregiver with the decision to place me in a care facility,” Loosemore said. “I don’t wish to cause them any guilt for wanting their own life. I’d like a chance to enjoy the rest of mine and not feel this guilt. I should feel relief, shouldn’t I?”
She wonders how many others feel this way about their own elderly parent, guided by selflessness yet tormented by self-blame.
Loosemore hopes she hears from someone who reads this story, possibly an old friend or two of her mother’s.
“Perhaps they will contact me to tell me that my mom always talked about me. And how proud she was of me,” she said. “Or maybe I will hear a story about her kindness, or her humor, so I can get to know her a bit.”