Most of the calls I get are about something already on a calendar. A follow-up in Barrington, an appointment out toward Hoffman Estates, a ride home from a rehab stay that ended a day earlier than anyone expected. Those rides matter, and I am glad to be the one making them. But they are not the ones I find myself thinking about afterward.
The ones I think about are the other kind. A granddaughter’s recital on a Thursday evening. Lunch with three friends who have been having lunch together since the seventies. The nine o’clock service and the same pew, and then the twenty minutes of standing around in the parking lot afterward, which is honestly why a lot of people came. A trip out to a garden center in early fall when the mums arrive, not because anything needs buying but because it is what you do in September and always has been.
Those are the outings that disappear first, and nobody ever really decides to end them. What happens is quieter than a decision. The keys get handed over, or a walker comes into the picture, or a knee gets noticeably worse over one winter, and suddenly every trip out of the house has to be worth somebody’s whole afternoon. A daughter who works full time in Schaumburg can rearrange a Tuesday for a cardiology appointment. She cannot rearrange it for lunch, and she would feel strange asking her brother to. So the appointments stay on the calendar and everything else falls quietly off it, and a year later the family is wondering why a parent who used to be out three or four times a week now only leaves the house when a doctor asks them to.
I would like to say plainly that this second kind of ride is the part I would most like to help with.
What it looks like in practice is less complicated than most families expect. You call, we pick a time, and I come get your mother or your father for the afternoon. If it is lunch in downtown Barrington, I am not dropping them at a curb and disappearing. I park, I walk them in, and I am there when they come out, which on a good day is quite a bit later than planned because somebody ordered dessert. If it is a service on Sunday morning, I take seriously that the walk from wherever you can actually park to wherever the door is can be the hardest part of the whole morning, and I plan for that rather than discovering it. If it is an evening thing in October and the sun is going down at six thirty, I am thinking about the walk back to the car in the dark, about the leaves that turn slick on a curb after rain, and about the fact that nobody who is already unsure on their feet wants to be hurried across a parking lot in the cold.
The vehicle handles a wheelchair without anyone having to be lifted or transferred or helped into a seat they cannot comfortably get into, so the chair is never the reason a plan gets cancelled. But that is the easy part. What actually makes the difference is the attention around it, and knowing there is no clock running out in the driveway, and that whoever is waiting is glad to be waiting.
Something I did not expect when I started is how much of this lands on the adult child rather than the parent. A woman told me recently that what mattered most about her mother’s standing Thursday lunch was not the lunch. It was that for the first time in two years there was something in her mother’s week that she did not personally have to make happen. The ride is for your parent. The relief, more often than not, is for you.
I only take on a small number of families at a time, because none of this works if I am rushing, and rushing is the one thing that would ruin it. Some families call me once, for a wedding or a graduation. Others settle into something regular, the same Thursday, the same restaurant, the same pew on Sunday, and those are the arrangements I enjoy most, because after a few weeks I stop being a driver and start being the person they expect.
If there is something your mother or father used to do every week and does not do anymore, that is worth a conversation. Call me at 224-578-2301 and tell me what it was. Very often it is easier to put back than anyone in the family has assumed.