The elderly is a very heavy social topic, most of the ones that pop up have unworthy children and grandchildren, so what if the children of the elderly are not so unconscionable, do the duty of care, what would it be? Is there always a happy ending? Some users have shared their own experiences
My grandmother lived to be 94, and my dad took care of her for ten years, which sounds like a lot of filial piety.
The first few years I didn’t think anything of it, but the last few years I became less and less impressed.
My dad is a big traveler himself, but he only went out once or twice in ten years because he had to arrange for someone else to take care of my grandmother. Occasionally, he would feel guilty about going out, and he couldn’t have a good time. My dad was quiet, and every day he would finish his chores, clean up after his grandmother, and watch anti-Japanese dramas on the computer. After Grandma left, he was almost 70 years old and couldn’t go to many places.
My mother, who was not accustomed to living with my father at my grandmother’s house and was worried about him, rode her bicycle back and forth every day until one day she fell in the snow and started to live on her own. Then she complained more or less because she wasn’t used to living there.
Finally, my grandmother, who had a bad leg, couldn’t get downstairs and was fat, seldom went out, preferring to sit by the window and watch the streets. My father served her dinner and then went to the computer to watch TV by himself. When I went home to talk with her and watch TV, she said I was the only person willing to sit and talk with her for a while. On her birthdays and holidays, her aunts and grandchildren would come home, eat and play cards, but my grandmother still watched TV by herself. In later years, she couldn’t watch TV anymore, so she just sat there and napped. My dad didn’t talk much, but my grandmother would call him when she woke up for anything, and he would go check on her.
The last few years, my grandmother lived like a plant. My dad was a bird tied to the plant. My grandmother’s house became a cage. My mother couldn’t stand to be in the cage with or without her. Other relatives, huh?
As for me, I go home twice a year. Before, I thought that if I was there, I could stay with my grandmother, and my father would be relieved that my mother would stay at my grandmother’s house for me. However, after I left, everything went back to the way it was. The feeling of powerlessness that I couldn’t change made me more and more reluctant to go back and face the reality.
My father’s unshirkable responsibility, my mother’s unbalanced struggle, my grandmother’s unacknowledged loneliness, and my helplessness to escape, filled everyone’s life with moral abduction, cold violence, and deep guilt and self-recrimination.
When my grandmother left, we all breathed a sigh of relief. Grandma’s house was sold, and she split the money with her relatives, Dad went out a few times, Mom finally moved back in with Dad, and I didn’t have to stay home all the time on vacation.
But the last ten years of my grandmother’s life had a profound effect on me. I didn’t want to get married and have children, and I didn’t want to live a long life. Because I had seen what the end of my life looked like, I lost sleep thinking about my parents’ retirement. I am an only child and I have no one to share the burden with, so I hope I am strong enough to take care of myself and my parents for the rest of my life.
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