Letting Go of Burdens

There's beauty in caring for the elderly—if you choose to see it.

My grandma on her wedding day.

Last week, my brother, aunt, grandmother, and I met with an eldercare attorney so that my grandma could begin the process of removing my father (her son) from her will. If he were to inherit her home, it would become a liability—an asset we’d have to spend down before my father could qualify for Medicaid. I’d been delicately explaining this to my grandma for years now, and, at last, she was ready to take action. 

My grandmother has trouble getting around—she’s 92 with bad knees—so I arranged for the lawyer to come to her house on Long Island. I cleared the placemats and Pepperidge Farm cookies from her small kitchen table, a table that’s ordinarily reserved for overeating pasta (a family tradition), and we gathered around to talk. The lawyer shared with my grandmother how he and his wife couldn’t leave anything to their two disabled children either, because it wouldn’t be in their kids’ best financial interest. “It’s really an act of love,” he explained. My grandmother warmed to this virtual stranger quickly and spoke fondly of him when he left, even if he did take $450 with him.

Truth be told, I wasn’t planning to write about this experience. I didn’t think there would be much of a payoff for other caregivers (or future caregivers) beyond “get your affairs in order.” But then I thought better of it—and, well, bear with me, because I have a point. 

After the lawyer left, I picked up my dad and brought him back to my grandma’s so he could join the four of us for lunch. As relieved as I was to have at least one long-overdue task off my plate, I was still buzzing with stress. My personal and professional to-do lists were piling up back home, and my dad, who is prone to mood swings as a result of his dementia, was not having what I’d call a good day. Plus, while everyone else was enjoying pizza, I was eating a tray of vegan teriyaki I’d hastily selected from the frozen-food aisle of Stop & Shop. I could, at times, scream.

Then things took a turn, as they so often do. We retreated to the living room to “sit soft,” as my grandma calls it, and look at old photos. I’d recently unearthed a bunch from the top shelf of a closet, and I hadn’t had a chance to flip through them yet. We each cracked open one of the sticky cellophane booklets, careful not to damage the memories inside. 

“I hid a lot of our pictures after grandpa died,” my grandmother told me. Why? “You’d look at them and cry,” she said. “I needed to help you move on.”

My grandfather had a heart attack when I was seven and he was 63 (my dad’s age when I first noticed something was wrong with him), and he died alone in a hospital. I don’t have a ton of memories of him, but the ones I do have make him out to be a saint (and me, a terror). I’d touch his balding head incessantly (“You were the only one who was allowed to,” my dad tells me). I’d yank up his sleeve so I could look at his skull-and-crossbones tattoo, which he got in the Navy, again and again. I’d tackle him on the couch. Cling to him in the pool. 

My dad loves sharing memories of his father—how he could make a tool out of anything, how he’d get up at 4 a.m. to drive to the Bronx (he was a trucker for an excavation company), how he learned to swim in the East River. “He’d push the garbage out of the way with one hand and push himself forward with the other.”

My grandparents met when they were kids in New York City. They lived a few blocks from each other in the east sixties and got married at Our Lady of Perpetual Help on East 61st (the church has since been torn down). Of all the photo albums in my grandmother’s house, their wedding album is the one I treasure most (thankfully, she didn’t think to hide that one). I could stare at their young faces for hours. Who were these crazy kids with their whole lives ahead of them? What late-night conversations led them to the south shore of Long Island? 

Grandma with her parents.

Grandma and Grandpa.

With our post-lunch photo albums in hand, we began what felt like a giddy show-and-tell. “Ohhhh, look at this one, Patricia.” (My grandmother calls me Pa-TREESH-a even though no one else does.) “Such a pretty dress,” she mused. My brother, a horror-movie buff, found a photo of his eight-year-old self getting a toy chainsaw for Christmas. I held up a shot in which he and I were holding hands. Even my dad joined in on the fun. “Who’s that handsome guy?” he joked. “I look so young.”

Grandpa, my dad, and me.

My brother and me.

In our jammies.

I took photos of the photos on my iPhone, as one does, and scrolled through them later that night. 

The next day, I attended the first virtual panel for a fellowship program I’m participating in with Columbia University’s Robert N. Butler Aging Center and the Mailman School of Public Health—an initiative that provides media training on issues around aging. (This year’s focus is on caregiving.) A woman named Linda Fried, MD, MPH, Dean of Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, kicked things off by explaining how we’ve reached an unprecedented milestone in the United States. “We now have more people over 65 in the U.S. population than under 15,” she said. By 2050, the 65-plus age group is projected to be 27 percent of our population. And by 2060, experts expect there will be 95 million adults in the U.S. over the age of 65—almost double the number in that demographic today. 

These are astounding projections that will have serious consequences for our society. But, Dean Fried stressed, it’s important to consider more than just the challenges an age boom will bring. “Our long lives come with a number of assets,” she said. “We accrue knowledge, expertise, an ability to analyze problems and make decisions about what’s important…” If we only focus on the downsides of an aging population, we’ll fail to harness the opportunities.

It was an important reminder for me as a journalist—and as a caregiver.

Caregiving can feel like a burden, especially if you’re dealing with it at a younger age than expected and/or lack the resources you need to get the job done. (And there’s no arguing that caregivers suffer serious emotional and financial strain, and deserve more social support than they get.) But, sometimes, it’s the feeling of burden that is the biggest burden of all—a narrative that keeps us from seeing the value of the people we’re caring for and the possibility of the moment we’re in. 

My grandmother is a complex woman who, at 4-foot-11, is a formidable figure in my life. She’s difficult and demanding. She’s notorious for her guilt trips. (I was two paragraphs into writing this newsletter when she called to scold me for not coming over on a Sunday. Then she called a second time to apologize.) She’s caused our family a lot of pain. 

But she’s also the only person who had the wisdom to tell me, when she saw me struggling to make my sick dad happy all the time, that nobody is happy all the time. “You can’t fix everything.”

In helping my grandmother rethink her will, I’ve had to confront the fact that, one day, she won’t be here. Her house, the only consistent home I’ve ever known, will most likely sell to strangers. These thoughts send me into a panic. I need more time to find out what she knows—about our family, about life. What dreams did she get to realize and which ones slipped away? 

“We borrowed about $7,000 for this house,” my grandmother told the lawyer at our meeting. She and my grandfather hired contractors to build it, but he worked on much of it with his own two hands. Their block—the whole surrounding area, really—was mostly woods when they moved there with two small kids in 1958. The house can’t be much more than 1,100 square feet (plus an unfinished basement), but for as long as I can remember it’s held five beds—one for my grandparents, two for their children, and one each for my brother and me. 

The Greco family moves to the suburbs.

I can’t promise to never again feel put out by chores and calls and doctor's visits, whether they’re for my dad or my grandma. I’m only human. But for every burden I feel, there is a family photo that waits to be rediscovered—a picture that will remind me of the shoulders I stand on and the crazy kids who gave me a place to call home. I hope I always think to look. 

The end.