Hi everyone –

After about 3 years of not writing, I’m going to start this back up again. Of course, I’m not really Sandwich Generation anymore. My parents passed away and my kids are off at college. I’m an empty nester who moved to the beach. So, it’s not the same juggling act.

However – I do find myself in the middle of 2 things again. The 2 things are middle age and old age. Not long ago I had dinner with a friend in Atlanta who responded when I told him that being middle-aged was hard, “Uh, you’re not middle aged. You’re old.” The first part was more difficult to argue with than I expected. Another friend frequently refers to this part of life as “the back 9.” I don’t play golf but I can do arithmetic. And the arithmetic says that out of 18 holes, it’s more like the back 6.

This part of life is full of contradictions that I find myself trying to work through. So, as with The Sandwiched Man Part I, I figured I could work through them online and maybe they’ll resonate for a few people. I was surprised at the people who told me that they read this blog regularly. I don’t think they were making that up because… well, why would you make that up?

So, if you’ve made it this far, I appreciate it and get ready for Part II of The Sandwiched Man…

I picked up a pretty serious triathlon habit a couple of years ago.  I started taking it seriously, hired a coach, and started caring about racing rather than finishing.  Triathlon is a sport that consumes a lot of disposable income; race entry fees are steep and of course, the equipment is expensive.  Some people spend $10,000 on a bike to shave off a few minutes on that part of the course.  I made a serious tri bike investment myself, but not to that level.  I got the advice that it’s not the chassis – it’s the motor.  And my motor needed a lot of work.

There are some less expensive cheats though.  One of these is no-tie shoelaces on your running shoes.  Having them will prevent you wasting precious time in the bike to run transition.  They can save 30 seconds and cost $4.

And they would have been great for my father.

No-tie laces fall into the category of “why did I not think of this while he was still alive?”  He wore slippers nearly everywhere because tying his shoes was very difficult for him.

Another one that I missed is going to the drugstore and buying cheap reading glasses.  His eyes were not the best and his eyeglasses pinched his nose.  For $100 I could have solved this problem.  There were times when he sat down in his powered recliner (probably the best thing I ever helped him buy) and his reading glasses were across the room.  Getting back to them was a lot of work, so he would go without.  The same $100 would have solved this problem too.

I have a remote-controlled fan in the bedroom and another next to my basement man-cave bike that lives on the trainer.  I love them.  If he were alive, I would remote-enable everything.

I bought an $89 Nespresso machine for my ever-expanding basement man-cave.  Espresso is my incentive for crawling out of bed for 5:45am workouts.  It just works.  But now that we have a puppy who sleeps 20 feet from my kitchen espresso maker, I had to supplement it with a unit that would deliver the caffeine I need without waking up Ollie.  My dad would have loved one of these things.  It’s so easy even he could have used it.

I think I did pretty well with his equipment; enabling him to live as independently as possible as was a good for him, and truth be told, probably just as important for my brother and me.  It was sheer self-preservation.  For years, keeping my sanity meant avoiding “emergency” phone calls.  I get it though.  You and I might take performing basic function– tying our shoes, cooling ourselves with a fan, making coffee – for granted.  Our elderly parents sometimes cannot.  It’s a loss of control and dignity, and when feel like you are running out of days, that’s an emergency.

I don’t watch my phone with that kind of bated breath anymore.  Every now and then though, I am reminded of those days, sometimes by something I have for a totally unrelated purpose.  It is like that.

Thanks to COVID-19, my kids are home from school for the next month or so.  We’ve started making plans for what happens if one of us gets sick, even if all of us get sick.  In that case, our puppy Ollie is in charge.  He hasn’t quite figured out Grubhub and only seems to be able to chase and catch sticks, so our diet is going to suffer.  But at least we’ll know when anyone is approaching the house, and we’ll never be alone.

I’m not a sandwich generation parent anymore.  It hasn’t stopped me from thinking about what we’d be doing now if my father were still alive.

He lived for the most part in an independent living community, which is a far cry from being a nursing home or even an assisted living facility.  He occupied his own apartment and could make his own decisions about when and how he wanted to leave.  Meals were meant to be communal and social, and so of course he decided to self-isolate.  He didn’t really care for most people.  One of the greatest days of his life was when he figured out that room service meals delivered for $6 per day would free him from having to interact.  Best money he ever spent.

Given his history of contracting and beating diseases – colon cancer and C-Diff among them – I am certain that COVID-19 would have found its way into his system.  His subpar hygiene almost guarantees it.  Then, if the coronvavirus could talk, it probably would say something like “Yeah, I see now why nothing kills this guy – it’s way too much work.”  And then he’d recover and marvel at still being alive.

Sometimes I picture the various things that tried to kill him hanging out together in a metaphorical locker room, dripping with sweat and exhausted, swapping stories about how close they came, only to bonk at the last moment at this unkillable giant.  Only Time could get him.

The hardest part for him might have been the forced isolation from visitors.  I get this recommendation.  I also know that despite all the people living together, these communities can be lonely.  On occasional Friday nights, we used to have dinner with Novas’s grandmother in her swank retirement community, and the other residents would mob us.  Yes, we had cute pigtailed blondie 4 year old twins in tow.  They were a sight to behold.  More than that though, we were new visitors in a place that already did not get many.  People were starved for contact with different people from the outside world.  I can’t imagine living in a sealed-off community where your children and good friends are prevented from actually seeing you.

I remember how my father need not only the health to live, but something to live for.  My brother and his kids would FaceTime him nearly every day, which was great nourishment for him.  It was also not enough.

For as much as he didn’t like most people, he too needed people.  He looked forward to visits from his Home Instead helpers and made sure to queue up videos and pictures for them.  We had our weekly Sunday get-togethers.  For months, he and I sometimes had loud arguments about my insistence that he change from his pajamas and robe into actual clothes when I’d come.  Truth be told, it was one way I could check if he was still mentally with it without having to ask him.  Eventually he gave in because he grew to like when I came, and he wanted me to be proud of him. I don’t know how he would have reacted to having those shut off.

I might have sneaked up the back stairs anyway – because like I said, there is no way the coronavirus could have killed him if C-Diff, colon cancer and the Nazis couldn’t do it.

Like everyone else, I hope this pandemic passes quickly.  That would be great.  I hope I don’t get it, and that my wife and kids don’t get it.  I don’t have elderly parents to worry about, which like many blessings is bittersweet.  If I did though, I’d also be reaching for a solution to their loneliness.  It too is a serious condition if left untreated.

I was wandering the aisles of CVS one night recently in search of salt tablets.  I couldn’t find them so I ambled back to the pharmacy department and waited so that I could ask where these might be.  Standing there, I flashed back to the moments where I’d stood in line many times to fill my dad’s prescriptions.  Also to the moments where I’d loaded up on Diet Coke for him… but that’s another blog post.

While waiting, it dawned on me just how important these people had been in my life when my father was alive.

When caring for an elderly parent, you are often at the whim of people you don’t know.  Their landlord and/or the person who runs their housing community and gets to decide whether their incontinence is a nuisance or a reason to evict them.  The nurse in the hospital when they find themselves there after a fall who gets to decide whether or not they suffer from dementia, which affects the whole care path.  The person at the DMV who can see that they can’t read the bottom line of the eye chart and gets to decide whether or not they get a driver’s license.  Most of them know more than you do about the subject matter of caring for the elderly, and almost nothing about the particular human being in question.

To this list, add the person who fills their prescriptions.

It’s going to happen at least once, and hopefully not more than once, that the doctor will have written a prescription that doesn’t make sense as written.  I spent hours in a compounding pharmacy in Hopewell, NJ one rainy summer night when my father had been discharged from physical therapy post his first C-Diff scare and his doctor had written a scrip for liquid vancomycin.  No one prescribes that, I didn’t know what a compounding pharmacy was (more on this another time maybe), and it’s $6,000 per course because it’s not covered by any insurance of any kind.  I was scared to death.  But he convinced me that pills would be fine, he’d call it into CVS and get them to cover the prescription even though it’s not what the doctor wrote, and there was a way to write the prescription such that it would be a different class of medication that Medicare looked at differently.  It was technical and confusing and made me wonder how people who don’t have advanced degrees figure this out.  Also, I was frantic and it was closing time.  He calmly explained that waiting 12 hours would be fine, really.

Then I left, drove to pick up Chinese food, went back to my father’s house where he was already asleep, and drank 50 beers to calm down.

And the next doctor, here in Massachusetts, made a similar mistake.  Again I found myself in front of a pharmacist who could have just shrugged and told me to just deal with it.  Instead, he chased down the doctor, got him to re-write the prescription, and helped me navigate the byzantine Medicare prescription classes again.  All while I stood there feeling frantic but grateful that he would help me when so many other people seemed to be uninterested in him, and in me.

This same pharmacy in Wellesley at the end of my street had filled his prescriptions so many times.  After a while they recognized me and would say “Hello Mr. Biro, are you picking up for your father today?”  I don’t know why that made me feel less alone but it did.

I dealt with many people who had more power than I did and tried to bully my father and me into a particular course of action.  Rare was the figure who both had authority and was empathic at the same time.  These people are gold.  Pharmacists were first among them.