by Nathan P. Origer
My ninety-four-and-and-two-thirds-year-old grandfather has spent the great bulk of his nine-plus decades on the same farm, born and raised in the older of the farm’s two Sears houses, built in 1913, and residing since he married my grandmother, in 1940, in the other. For most of my life, the man has been an extraordinary example of remaining healthy and living well in old age; however, in the last few months, his health has become less reliable, and he’s made a few overnight stays in the hospital. After his last visit, my aunt, who happened to have planned to come home from Texas for a week, filed the emergency paperwork necessary to have him admitted immediately to a local nursing home. He remains there presently, ostensibly only for as long as he must to finish his rehabilitation program.
Studying some seven hundred miles away, I don’t have a particularly clear, complete understanding of all that’s going on, but what I do know is that, even though it’s a nice facility (My dad has had nothing but good things to say about the accommodations and the staff, and my grandpa, who seems to have found himself a “girlfriend” across the hall, grudgingly agrees.), Grandpa, quite understandably, isn’t all too thrilled, because it’s not home. He actually lamented to my father, “I was born and lived my whole life on the farm; why can’t I just die there?” (not that, as far as any of us have reason to expect, he’s anywhere near passing on from this temporal existence!). But, fear not, this is just a necessary temporary arrangement, until he’s feeling better regularly and has regained strength.
Right?
Enter this weekend, when, for the first time in a few years, my dad’s brother (and one of my cousins) and two sisters descended on North Judson, IN, simultaneously. They all spent time catching up in person, visiting their father, and, presumably, saying hello to an old friend or two in town; inevitably, they also talked about my grandfather’s situation. My father, I think, was rather blindsided when his three siblings concluded that Grandpa probably ought to spend the rest of his days, however numerous — and, even, healthy — they be, in a nursing home — however nice and well staffed it is — twenty long miles away from his birthplace, where his parents raised eight (I think) children; his home, where he and my grandmother raised four kids; his farm, where he milked cows twice daily, seven days a week, for decades, and grew numerous crops; and his cats, which, until his present exile, he dotingly fed every morning and every evening.
My aunts and uncle, my dad tells me, proffered plenty of cogent reasons for this, and presented this alternative as the easiest for my father — the only child still nearby, who already has been making daily trips to the farm on which he grew up, which he worked for two decades, to tend to Grandpa’s needs and to offer company —, on whom Grandpa’s returning to the farm in greater need will prove to be even more burdensome. However, being Origers, they obstinately refused to accede to my father’s assertions that a) he’s willing to put in even more effort to keep their dad at the only home he’s ever known and b) they have an obligation to their dad to exhaust every possible option (e.g., hiring live-in help) before they, in Grandpa’s own words, dump him in a home. (My father, a wonderful man, is clearly more compassionate than Homer Simpson.) Moreover, recalling that bringing my grandmother back to the farm for thirty minutes, on a trip out of the nursing home where she spent her finals months, nearly killed her, they essentially averred, in response to my father’s query, that he could never, when checking Grandpa out for an afternoon, take him back to his farm, lest it should have a similar — likely worse — effect on him. Ninety-four years on the farm, and then no more. Not even a drive by the property.
Here’s where the two conflicts between what I profess and what I wish, in the real world, to see happen. First, the carefree, easy-living nursing home lifestyle ain’t cheap; after a couple of months of Medicare (and AARP) coverage, the patient foots the bill, approximately two hundred dollars per diem — and that’s in low-cost-of-living rural Indiana. My grandfather, though far from impoverished, is not wealthy; in no more than a year, if that, of his living in the home, his liquid assets would be a thing of the past (and, thus, so too would be my aunts’ and uncle’s inheritances; I’m not particularly concerned with matters of inheritance though, save my father’s . . . ). Once that happens, they (whoever, exactly, undertake what I hope is an unpleasant task) either seize the farm, in the hands of the Origer family for more than a century, or compel us to sell. This being so, my father, on my aunt’s suggestion — and my insistence, too, I must admit — will be calling the attorney to determine whether transferring the property to my parents, the designated inheritors of the farm upon my grandfather’s passing, early, to avoid our having to lose the land, is possible.
If (The gummint folks ain’t always stupid, ya know!) this works, the land remains with the family (giving my parents a nice additional bit of rental income — Thank you, moronic ethanol-encouraging policies! — and allowing us to do our small part to maintain continuity and to live out, indirectly (We no longer farm the land ourselves, but rent it to a local farm.), some sort of conservative, Distributist, agrarian way), and Medicaid foots the bill. Great for my family in practice; gut-wrenchingly hypocritical for me to support. And yet not only have I emphatically encouraged my father to try to make this transaction, but have further suggested that he transfer any of Grandpa’s liquid assets possible into a savings account solely in my dad’s name, one left untouched so that Grandpa still can access the money, should he return home someday, or so that my dad can take care of any bills due in Grandpa’s name, further denying the nursing home my grandfather’s money and, of course, increasing the taxpayer burden for caring for him. So much for my purportedly principled opposition to the welfare state and reliance upon taxpayers, rather than ourselves, eh?
A friend to whom I spilled my guts about all of this, whose own grandmother was in something of a similar position (though she’s much younger, and in at least moderately better health), asked if the alternative ultimately settled upon for her grandmother might work for my family’s situation. To wit, she inquired whether moving Grandpa into my parents’ home might be a sufficient compromise. This I should support wholeheartedly; just as I find the welfarism that I now find myself encouraging (assuming that my father’s siblings prevail) to be fundamentally wrong, the mere thought of taking a reasonably healthy family member out of his home (In my grandmother’s case, I don’t believe that anything other than a nursing home was a viable option, sad enough.) and dumping (again, Grandpa’s dolorously chosen term) him in even a really nice nursing home, rather than welcoming him into his child’s house, is anathema to me.
But there’s no way that I could realistically suggest this to my dad. As I said, three other siblings live one hundred-plus, hundreds of, and a thousand-plus miles away, so moving him into their homes is out of the picture; their moving back to the farm is an equally preposterous proposal. (Well, in theory any of them, particularly my two aunts, could do it, but that involves self-re-deracination in order to replant roots at home.) Thus, my parent’s home remains the only option here; we have three finished bedrooms in the house (parents’, mine, and my brother’s, the latter two of which are only intermittently occupied, other than by feline family members), four if you count the office — but all of those are upstairs. A small room off of the dining room served as my great-grandmother’s room (My family’s house has been in the family, through my paternal grandmother, for more than a century, too: We got roots, I tells ya!) in her later years, but it would spell claustrophobia for just about anyone, especially someone who’s spent his entire life on a farm. Furthermore, my parents both work full-time (another thing about which I probably shouldn’t be thrilled, but I’m more than cognizant of the fact that the sort of sacrifices required for a family to rely on one income just have never been something that my parents could afford; small-scale farming just offers too little, too often, for too much input, to try to rely solely on that income when raising two children; the bills, it seems, didn’t stop after we became independent of them, especially because of health problems that have plagued my father in recent years). They could not provide the sort of support necessary here any more than they could if Grandpa were to stay on the farm, where at least having daily nursing visits or live-in help would be more practical than at my parents’ home.
So now I find myself attempting to reconcile fundamental beliefs about how families, society, and government ought to function with a reality that tests my ability to maintain these beliefs to my limits. I want to see my grandfather remain on the farm, as he wishes, as my father would prefer, but I recognize that this entails sacrificing the attentive care provided at the nursing home, and likely will cost him, if not as much as remaining in the home will, a fair amount of money. If this turns out, either by necessity or my aunts’ and uncle’s loving obstinacy, to be an impossibility, I seek to place the financial burden for caring for him not on us, where it should belong, but on a government — that is, on taxpayers — that at least ostensibly can better afford it. I don’t like it, but I realize that my parents simply could not handle having Grandpa in the house (whereas Dad is more than willing, if not always possessed of sufficient energy to be wholly able, to do everything within his power to keep his progenitor on the family farm), and for reasons personal (selfish?) and philosophical simply cannot fathom the thought of the farm passing out of the Origer family. Does an appropriate compromise — both practically and philosophically, for me — exist? If so, where?
Recent Comments