You and your Father-In-Law are both right, I think.
I'm with you on health insurance -- clearly the entire medical industry is driven by deep pockets. So we don't need to talk about it.
Also, caregivers DO need caregivers. At the very least, somebody to acknowledge what they are doing.
I just spent three weeks with my own Father-In-Law, cleaning out the sheep shed and helping him cope with over sixty years of accumulated farm junk. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I did things the way he wanted them done, even when it was clearly illogical, useless, spend a dollar to save a dime, or otherwise ridiculous.
For example, he had this antique cabinet in the sheep shed that had once been a high-tech kitchen cabinet with compartments for everything, a roll-up front panel, and a swing down hopper for flour or sugar. It was clearly disintegrating, and had been occupied by hornets for decades, judging from the nest debris we pulled out of it (I sprayed for them first, a couple of day's before.)
The screws fastening it to the the wall of the sheep shed would not budge, so I suggested that we get a hole saw out of his shop and drill around the screws. (A hole saw has a drill bit in the center and a circular saw. It's for cutting larger holes in wood with an electric drill.)
The smallest hole saw he had was two inches in diameter, which would have worked fine, and would have left six two inch holes in the back panel of this cabinet.
"No, I don't want to damage the cabinet. It's an antique."
"It'll be OK, Dad. Let's just do it."
"No, I'll go to town and get a smaller hole saw."
"OK, but I'm here now to help and I won't be tomorrow."
"I'll get somebody to help me get it down."
"You sure?"
"Yep."
"OK Dad, that's what we'll do, then."
This is simply one example of dozens of cases where he saw value in something that we were dealing with when almost anybody else would conclude that it should go to the dump. Quite frankly, I made several dump runs with stuff from the farm and saw other people throwing things away that were an order of magnitude better shape that the stuff he kept.
He had a brand new $20,000 barn built to keep things in, and the most valuable thing in it was a pile of walnut lumber that he was air drying. It was probably about $2000 worth. The rest was old rusty antique farm implements that had been outside already for over fifty years, and no longer functioned.
But I got out of that three weeks something that his own two sons could not get. I enjoyed him and the work we did together. I am amazed at what he can do, and though I'm 25 years younger than he, I was no more productive. His sons cannot work with him very long because they insist on the more sensible, logical thing to do rather than the way he wants to do it, and things get contentious right away. I let him have it his way.
Dad is 88 years old, so every day with him is precious to me. I'd much rather enjoy them that fight over what makes sense. |
