Her daughter, Ann Schaffer Shirreffs of Cleveland, said she knows she can’t tell her mother what to do: “At this point, she’s almost 90 years old, and if she wants to get together with three other ladies and sit less than six feet from each other and handle the cards, what can I say? There’s nothing I can say.” Still, she said, “I lose sleep over it.”
Thomas cautioned against young people trying to change older parents’ activities: “It’s a really ageist presumption on the part of these 60-year-old children that they get to tell their parents what to do. They get to do whatever they want. My message to the 60-year-olds is: Get over it. Let them live their life. Part of being an adult or a grown-up is you have the right to do stupid things . . . but that person has to accept the consequences — young people aren’t going to want to be around you.”
A health commissioner's fight to help his county and his own family
Health commissioner Roland Walker of Gary, Ind., found himself struggling to get coronavirus tests for his county, then his own parents fell ill. (Zoeann Murphy, Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)
But Sepideh Sedghi, 51, of Beverly Hills, Calif., can’t avoid her parents — she lives with them in a condominium building — and she has underlying health concerns of her own.
“I think they were more paranoid in the beginning and now have become more lax,” she said. “There’s been this desire to maybe play backgammon or cards with one of our neighbors. My mom has been saying, why don’t we go somewhere for Fourth of July? And I’ve had to explain that even though much of the country is opening up, they’re older. . . . So every day is an explanation of how and why and why not.
“My dad has this attitude of he survived World War II, cholera, typhus epidemic, the Islamic revolution, and he’s not going to be taken down by corona,” she added.
For isolated older people, pandemic is a ‘cruel event at this time in our lives’
In some cases, adult children have come to a kind of peace with their parents’ relative lack of concern.
Jane Daych is the reigning cornhole champion at her assisted-living facility, the Hearth at Tuxis Pond, in Madison, Conn. (Kathy True)
Dana Faulkner of Chevy Chase, Md., realizes that, thanks to the pandemic, she may not see her mother again. Her mother, whom Faulkner describes as “an outdoors person,” is 92 and in an assisted-living facility in Connecticut. Faulkner recently returned from a trip there during which she was able to visit her mother, Jane Daych, by waving up to her third-floor window.The facility was barring visitors and prohibiting outings off-site aside from essential medical appointments, but her mother “instantly takes the mask off whenever she can, though the aide tries to get her to wear it.” She also walks through common areas of her building to go out for daily walks on the grounds, a level of risk some in the facility aren’t taking.
Faulkner has a background in public health and knows that if her mother developed covid-19, there would be a good chance she would not survive: “At her age and as a diabetic, her risk factors are off the charts in a facility where there have been confirmed cases of the virus.”
But the last time they saw each other before Faulkner returned to Maryland, her mother insisted on a hug.
Faulkner hesitated, then hugged her mother.
“Afterward, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this was really a transgression,’ ” she said.
Then she thought about it some more. If this was going to be her mother’s last summer on earth, maybe the most important thing to her was to get out and breathe the fresh air.
“I would say her impulse to be outside and to enjoy the world while she has it is instinctive rather than analytical,” she said. “There isn’t a big fear factor going on — she seems to be pretty calm about the whole thing. . . . She said she had a dream in which the Lord was holding the door open for her, saying, ‘Jane, I’m here, the door’s open whenever you’re ready.’ ”
Is Faulkner glad they hugged?
“I am,” she said. “I am.”
(End of article)
The way I see it, I'm not afraid of death but I'm indeed afraid of suffering while I die. Given a choice, I'd like to go to sleep after my nightly prayers and just not wake up. Since I think I'm a reasonable person with some brains I will do everything in my power to keep from getting this curse and dying a miserable death trying to breathe. 
I'm banking on science having a vaccine before I die of something else, because we both still have a heck of a lot of living to do.
