Hoping to see the light.........

I'm sitting here with a knot in my stomach.

It's going to be here for another 9 hours.

At 4:30 in the morning, I placed my parents....in a creamsicle orange and white ambulance and sent them 700 miles south to a nursing facility near my house.

My dad was discharged from the hospital on Tuesday and within 24 hours of being in a skilled nursing facility.....he was taken to the emergency room because he pulled his feeding tube out and later was found on the floor less than an hour after he returned to his room.

Scared and angry....and fearing the facility ....not the consequences of his stroke would kill him.....I called the social worker at a nursing home we eventually wanted to settle my parents in and pleaded with him.....find a way to get my parents down now.

Hours later.....there was a plan..... I grabbed my purse, my cellphone, my keys and my dog and drove back to Chicago.

I went to the each of my parent's facilities and signed papers and told my parents about the arrangement---an ambulance ride, a good facility near my home....and they could be together again.... share the same room. After 60 years of marriage.....I felt this was important and vital to their care and well-being.

They seemed happy.....my dad laughed when I told him he was headed down south....and my mom....well... she just wanted to be near my dad.

When the ambulance pulled away in the dark and rain.....I cried as I waved goodbye.....I cried because I hoped they would have a safe journey and because I have pulled them away from the city they were born in....the house they lived in....and the few friends they still have.

But even camped out here at their house, I found I couldn't manage the situation. I didn't know the area, the facilities, the reputations.....I didn't have connections....and Chicago is so big....I felt like I was a broker in an impersonal elderly meat market.....where there are thousands of little old folks like my parents.....needing help....needing care.....with scattered families.....and small sad stories.

I pulled them away but I also pulled them into something....a community.....which holds me and my family...our connections....and a solid university system ....to manage their health care.

My hub and son will meet them when they arrive .....I'll stay up here for a few days.....and begin to settle their house and estate.

I'll bring their TV and some small furniture down....and in a couple more weeks I'll haul down their favorite easy chairs....the pictures which hung on their bedroom walls .. the god-awful mechanical singing birds my mother seems to adore.....my dad's radio.

It is the beginning of a plan....my feeble attempt to stabilize their lives and mine............I feel an odd kinship to people who have gone through an earthquake.....oh the longing for the ground to be stable and for everything to stop shaking.

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