A familiar dilemma

We were at the golf club again yesterday. There was a post funeral event there, so we went into the smaller members only room. There we saw Brian again & duly joined him.

Brian, we discovered, is faced with an increasingly familiar dilemma.

He’s elderly & his health is not so good these days. He’s lived in Morecambe for over 40 years. His children & family have all moved away to live. Now Brian needs extra support, so what to do?

He’s trying to adjust to the idea of moving down to Oldham, near Manchester, where his daughter lives.

But he loves Morecambe. The views from his flat across the Bay are unparalleled. He lives next door to Happy Mount Park, a great place to take his great-grandchildren to entertain them on their visits. The golf club is just a few hundred yards beyond. Most days he goes along to the golf club, which he first joined in 1971. There, he’s almost guaranteed to bump into some people he knows for a chat. Certainly there’s always something happening.

In Oldham he knows nobody apart from the family & they will be working most of the time, so he’ll be on his own most of the time. He will have to rebuild his life afresh.

Yet his family can’t move to Morecambe. They have their jobs to get to, careers to follow.

This dilemma is so common these days, when families are so far spread. There was a time when most families stayed more or less in the same place all their lives. Caring for the elderly, the young & the infirm could easily be organised within the extended family. Not so now.

I remember our own feelings when the Fox’s parents reached that stage. We suggested they moved up to Arnside, where we were then living, but they didn’t want to move from Manchester & the Fox’s brother & their grand-daughter. We equally couldn’t face life in Manchester. Our solution was for us to make more frequent trips down to Manchester to visit them.

For us, things will be relatively easy. As we have no children to look after us, we no doubt will end up going into a local home if we get to the stage we can no longer look after ourselves or be looked after in our own homes. We just have to hope we will be able to afford somewhere reasonably compatible to live in by then.

But for those who do have children the dilemma does exist. Who does the moving? How is the compromise to be made? Who has to have the disruption to their life? And will any change be for the better?