getting there should be the easy part of your parent’s day

Most of the families who call me are not thinking about a vehicle when they first pick up the phone. They are thinking about a parking lot. They are thinking about the distance between where a car is allowed to stop and where the door actually is, and about the fact that their mother cannot cross that distance the way she could a year ago, and that nobody in the family has quite found the words to say so out loud.

The appointment itself is forty minutes. The day around the appointment is four hours, and almost all of the difficulty lives in those other three hours and twenty minutes.

Here is what that day tends to look like when a son or a daughter is handling it alone. There is the getting ready, which always takes longer than anyone planned for. There is the transfer into a car that was never designed for it, done in a driveway, sometimes in the rain, usually with one person doing something a physical therapist would wince at. There is the drive, which is the only genuinely easy part. Then there is the arrival, and the arrival is where days come apart: circling for a spot near the entrance, giving up, parking out at the far end, and then the slow walk in with a wheelchair or a walker and a coat and a folder of paperwork while the clock keeps moving.

And then all of it happens again in reverse at the end of the day, when everyone involved is more tired than they were that morning.

I built what I do around those three hours and twenty minutes, not around the drive.

In practice that means I arrive early rather than exactly on time, and I come to the door rather than to the curb. It means the transfer happens properly, in a vehicle built for it, so that nobody in the family has to lift anyone or improvise. It means I am not circling for parking with someone waiting in the back seat, and it means the trip home is not a second negotiation with a second stranger, because I am already there and your father does not have to explain himself twice in one afternoon.

Winter changes the arithmetic here more than people expect. From late November through March, a curb in Barrington is rarely just a curb. It is a curb with a ridge of plowed snow behind it, or a film of ice that looks like wet pavement, or a puddle at the bottom of a ramp that refreezes by three in the afternoon. A walk from the parking lot that is merely long in September becomes genuinely unsafe in January, and the family member who was managing fine on their own in the fall is often the one who calls me in the winter. I would rather be the person who is already booked for that January morning than the person you are trying to find at seven in the morning with four inches on the ground.

The geography out here does not help either. Appointments scatter. A cardiologist in one town, an eye specialist in another, physical therapy twice a week somewhere off Route 14, a procedure that requires a signed ride home from a hospital half an hour away. None of it is far in miles. All of it is far in effort, especially when the same person is doing the driving, the waiting, the walking in, and then going back to work.

The part I did not fully appreciate until I had been doing this a while is how much of it has nothing to do with appointments at all. A good share of my driving is lunch in town, a hair appointment someone has kept for twenty years, church on Sunday morning, a grandchild’s recital, a daughter’s house for a birthday. These are the things that quietly fall off the calendar first when getting there becomes difficult, and they are almost always the things that mattered most. Nobody ever tells you they have stopped going out. The invitations simply start getting declined, and a year later the world has gotten smaller without anyone deciding that it should.

If you are the one arranging things for a parent right now, my honest suggestion is to think about the whole day rather than the ride. Ask where the drop-off actually is. Ask how far the walk is from there. Ask what happens if the appointment runs ninety minutes long, or if it is snowing when you come out. Those questions tell you far more about how a day will go than anything else you can ask.

I drive every ride myself. There is no rotating pool of drivers, and no one you have not met showing up at your parent’s door, which also means I only take on a small number of families at a time. If you are working out what your father’s Tuesdays are going to look like this winter, call me at 224-578-2301 and tell me about the day you are trying to make easier. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right fit for it.