Opinion | The hardest part of a parent aging isn’t the decline everyone warns you about — it’s the first time they apologize for needing you

Everyone warns you about the decline of your parents. It’s the part that can be described, so it’s the part people describe.

The stairs taken one at a time, with a hand on the rail he’d deny using. The story about the dealership told twice in an afternoon. The volume you find yourself using, and then hate yourself for using. It’s all coming, and it’s all hard, and you can brace for it the way you brace for anything you’ve read about in advance.

But the thing you can’t brace for? The apology.

The first time your father says sorry for needing you, something changes that doesn’t change back. And I’ve come to think it’s the harder thing, for a reason that has nothing to do with how sad it is. The decline happens to him. It’s between him and his body, and there’s no version of it where you’re implicated.

The apology happens between the two of you. And you’re the reason he’s saying it.

The first time they say it

Mine came in a hospital parking garage, which I’ve since learned is where a lot of them come.

I’d driven him to a cardiology appointment. Forty minutes each way, nothing crazy — they ran the test, looked at the results, and told him he was fine. He was quiet on the way back to the car. Then, as I was reversing out of the space, still looking over my shoulder, he said, “I’m sorry about all this. I know you’ve got work.”

He said it to the dashboard. He didn’t look at me once.

The word for what was in his voice is polite. That’s the whole problem with it.

This is a man who once drove to my apartment at eleven at night because I’d said, in passing, that a smoke alarm was chirping. He didn’t call first. He brought his own ladder. He has never in his life apologized for anything he did for me, because it never entered his head that any of it required an apology. It was the arrangement. It’s the entire point of the arrangement.

So when the politeness shows up, it means the arrangement has been renegotiated, and nobody told you the meeting was happening. He has decided he’s in your debt now. And a man who thinks he’s in your debt talks to you like a colleague.

They spent fifty years on the giving side

He isn’t apologizing about the drive. The drive is nothing, and he knows it’s nothing. He’s apologizing about a position he’s found himself in and has no idea how to occupy.

For fifty years, he was the one who gave. The tuition. The ladder at eleven at night. The two thousand dollars for the security deposit that we both agreed was a loan, and that neither of us ever mentioned again. He was comfortable there — people get comfortable in a role they’ve held so long they’ve stopped noticing it’s a role.

Now it’s reversed, and the research on relationships in later life says that’s a worse seat to be in.

Being on the receiving end of more than you can give back is what researchers call an overbenefited position, and it comes attached to indebtedness, guilt, and shame. Older people sitting in it reported more distress and more loneliness than the ones giving more than they got.

Which is worth sitting with, because it inverts what you’d assume. You are the one doing the driving, the calling, the pill-sorting, the worrying at two in the morning. And yet, he’s the one having the harder time.

The help they can see is the help that hurts

This is where it stops being sad and becomes a problem you’re part of.

Niall Bolger tested what happens when someone helps you, and you can see them doing it. He told people they were about to give a speech in front of strangers, which is roughly as stressful as a psychology lab is allowed to get, and then had a peer offer them a hand.

Half of them got the obvious kind of support. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine, you’ve got nothing to stress about. The other half got the same help, pointed slightly away from them — the peer talking about the task in general, or about their own nerves, so the reassurance was in the room without anybody being singled out as the person who needed it.

The indirect version worked. The obvious version either did nothing or left people feeling worse than if nobody had said a word.

The reason, as he read it, is that obvious help says something underneath itself. When you can see someone helping you, you also receive a message nobody meant to send, which is that they didn’t think you could handle it on your own. You can’t strip that out of the offer. It comes welded to it.

Which means the apology isn’t a symptom of his decline at all. It’s a receipt. It tells you the help was visible to him, that he filed it as help, and that he got the message riding underneath.

The message came from you

And if the apology is a receipt, then somebody handed it to him. It was you.

Not on purpose. Not unkindly. You said, “Dad, don’t be ridiculous, I’ll drive you,” and you meant it as love, and it went into him as an assessment of what he can no longer do.

And there is no good sentence available in that car. I’ve been through them all.

“Don’t be silly” makes him smaller; it tells him his read of the situation is wrong, which is the same thing you’ve been telling him all afternoon. “You’re welcome” is worse, because it accepts the terms. It agrees that a debt was incurred. And saying nothing just lets the whole thing stand there in the car with you for forty minutes.

What I said was, “It’s fine.” I’ll admit, I’ve said better sentences.

So stop being seen helping

If Bolger is right, the fix is unglamorous, slightly depressing, and effective.

Don’t ask if he needs a ride. Mention that you’re heading out that way anyway.

Don’t offer to sort the pills into the days-of-the-week box — do it while he’s in the kitchen, and never bring it up.

Don’t ask whether he wants you to call more often. Just call more often, about nothing, the way you’d call a friend.

The cost is that you get no credit for any of it, and there’s a part of you that wants the credit. That part of you doesn’t get a vote.

Yes, this is deception

I want to state the case against me, because it’s a decent one.

What I’m describing is deception. I sort his pills in secret. I invent errands that just happen to be near his hospital. I have appointed myself the manager of what my father is allowed to know about his own situation, and I never asked him whether he wanted the job filled.

And there’s a real argument that the decent thing is the opposite of all this:

Let him see the help. Let him say thank you. Let him carry the discomfort of being helped, because he is a grown man, and grown men carry things, and deciding he can’t handle a true sentence is its own insult — the same insult I’m supposedly protecting him from.

I don’t have a clean answer to that. I’ve decided I’d rather lie to him than watch him apologize, and I’m aware that’s a decision I made for my comfort at least as much as his.

And so I lied to my dad again 

Last week, I drove him again. I told him I had something near the hospital anyway, which wasn’t true, and I said it in the most boring voice I own so it wouldn’t sound like a kindness.

He spent the entire drive telling me what was wrong with the radio station I’d picked, and what was wrong with the route I’d chosen, and what kind of person leaves for an appointment that early.

He didn’t say sorry once.