QUESTION: I'm about to retire, and wrestling with my conscience.
My mother, now 86, lives alone just outside London - I'm in Hastings - and suffers terribly with arthritis, despite the doctors' best efforts. My sister lives in Scotland, but my brother, who lives nearer, does pop in a couple of times a week. Also, nurses come three times a day. I visit once a fortnight.
My mother couldn't live in my tall, narrow house, so should I go and live with her? I'd hate to lose my friends and social life here. But she's always been good to me. What should I do?
Yours sincerely,
Michael
ANSWER: This is a problem that's going to face most of us at some point - or if it won't affect us, it will affect our children.
But I would resist making this move, however much you feel you owe your mother. She certainly doesn't lack company, with the constant visits from nurses and your brother, and she seems to be coping reasonably well. Would she really appreciate you moving in, trying to hide your resentment at having to give up a carefully built social life in Hastings? That resentment would be there, however hard you tried to suppress it.
Could you not simply go up for longer periods - stay, perhaps, for two or three days once a fortnight rather than just nip up for lunch or whatever you do at present? Would it be possible to find something interesting to do in your mother's area so that you wouldn't just be twiddling your fingers when you weren't unscrewing stiff jars or helping her upstairs?
I think, also, dogged by guilt and feelings of obligation - which show you are a very kind fellow - you are forgetting about your own old age. You live in a tall and narrow house, you say. It's important, at your age, to keep yourself fit, partly by going up and down the flights; it's said that older people who move into bungalows age far more quickly than people like you who use a lot of puff getting from one room to another.
It's also important to maintain the friendships you've built up in Hastings. Not just for your own sake - friends are a great support when you're older - but because they, too, will be needing your help when they get problems. You have an obligation to your friends as well as to your mother. You don't want to find, when your mother dies and you perhaps become disabled, that you're stuck in a suburb of London with not a friend in sight.
If your mother can use the computer, teach her how to Skype - or buy her a phone on which you can Facetime each other. Nothing like the real thing of course, but if she has a daily phone call from you to look forward to every evening, her life will be much improved.
And who knows, since you're clearly a sympathetic family, she might, were you to move in, feel very guilty at getting you to give everything up, and that would be a horrible atmosphere to live in. Your mother guilty and you resentful.
No, visit her more often, stay longer and phone more frequently. For the moment, that's the best way you can help her.
The Independent