Uncle Frank...

Many have asked us about Uncle Frank...

It is SUCH a long story, with LOTS of crazy details, but here is the basic situation we have been dealing with...

This past July, we went to visit Brian's 87 year-old Uncle Frank (from the Detroit area) to celebrate his birthday. We do this every year, as we are really the only family that he has left. On this particular visit, we learned that he had recently been issued a traffic violation which eventually led to the loss of his driver's license. We left particularly concerned about his progressed dementia, and began putting things in place to have basically an elder's helper escort him around town twice daily, to deal with paying bills and acquiring food. This worked reasonably well for a short while, yet he was still VERY upset that he couldn't drive his 2005 Mustang. And we had to call him twice a day to remind him when his rides were coming. Then... one beautiful Saturday morning near the beginning of August, we received word that Uncle Frank had been hospitalized. He was taken to the hospital because he convinced his doctor's office that he had not eaten in days, and he couldn't find his car keys to get out to get food. In actuality, he had been out for both breakfast AND dinner the previous day, as was scheduled for EVERY day. And we had given his car keys to the Senior Center to put in their safe, as we knew he wouldn't remember or even understand why he couldn't drive.

We quickly packed up, and headed to Detroit, unaware of the amazing change we were about to experience in our daily lives. As it turned out, the hospital would only release Uncle Frank to some sort of living center, so his days of living independently were over. Within 48 hours, we had packed up the critical items from his mobile home and moved him into a care facility here in Holland. (Picture driving a U-Haul into a Senior Mobile Home Community late in the evening and packing up one of the resident's belongings... leaving in the dark of the night...) We DEFINITELY had some very interested individuals watching as the kids ran around, and Brian, his mom, and I frantically packed all that we could in the U-Haul so that we could get home sometime before 3:00 a.m. and get a little sleep before returning the next day to get Uncle Frank from the hospital and move him to a community he had never even visited. My parents came the very next morning, and my mom, dad, and I (along with three tired kids) unloaded the U-Haul and tried to make his apartment at the assisted living facility look as much like home as possible. Meanwhile, Brian and his mom returned to Detroit to get Frank.

Fortunately, he has adjusted amazingly well, considering he was adamant that he would live in that mobile home "until he died". Since his move, however, we have been absolutely consumed by things I never envisioned dealing with at this stage in life... medicare, managing months of past due bills, including insurance policies for both his home and car that he let expire, keeping his weekly calendar, paperwork beyond belief, and recently, trying to remedy an identity theft issue for him. (Very difficult to do on behalf of someone else...) The blessings are... we have met some wonderful people at his care facility, the kids have become very compassionate, not only for him, but for all the other older people they have met in his building, Uncle Frank is receiving excellent care and is now getting the correct doses of all of his medications, AND he seems like he is truly enjoying having people to interact with on a daily basis. Our hope is that all the paperwork and "details" of his move will soon lessen, and we can resume some sort of normalcy to our own lives. I am sure that down the road, we will recognize even more blessings from this experience, even though it seems overwhelming right now.