by Patricia Young

Created on: September 06, 2008   Last Updated: November 01, 2008

The past few years for my husband and me have been a time of change and enlightenment. We have had to face our own mortality through the realization that our parents have become like our children, and our children have become adults.

When our children left, our empty home fairly echoed with memories of times past happy times when the kids were small and our days were filled with living, laughing and loving. Then, all too soon, they were grown up and ready for their own adventures in the big, wide world. Our girls had married and gone to start new lives with their respective husbands. My man and I were "empty nesters", so we decided to sell our home and move to a little seaside town a few hundred miles away. We made our plans, excited at the thought of our own daring adventure.

My husband's parents lived far away in New Zealand, but my parents always lived close to us. They were both in their eighties and up until recently had been healthy and active. My father was starting to show signs of dementia and my mother had recently fallen out of bed. She suffered spinal damage and was in hospital.

THE SQUEEZE was upon us! We put our sea change plans on hold, and I became my parents' carer. My father was an old dear. He was always happy and smiling when I arrived for my daily visits to keep him company and help with the housework and meals. He had always been quick with numbers in his job as an accountant before he retired, and it was heart wrenching to watch his mind deteriorating almost daily. One terrifying day, my father went missing. It was truly awful. I kept listening for the sound of the police car pulling up in the driveway to tell me he was dead. But he was found sitting at a bus stop miles away from home, safe and well. Goodness knows just how he got there.

It was now time for me to face the fact that my father would have to go into care. I knew that the responsibility of caring for him was too much for me, now that he had started wandering away from home. I felt really guilty I thought I had failed as a daughter. At this time, my husband and I realized that mother would never be able to walk again. She would have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. By now I was quite distraught. Our sea change plans were fading into the distance.

Then my wonderful husband had a great idea about how to deal with my aging parents. "Let's try to stay positive," he told me. "We can still move to the beach, and take your parents with us. They can go into care in our new

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