American Greetings/Hallmark: Cards for nearly everyone and everything — even dogs and divorces — but not for the old

My mom’s cousin, Dorothy, turns 84 this month and I can’t find a birthday card.

Dorothy, like my mom, grew up poor.

(How poor? Dorothy likes to tell a story about coffee grounds: Her mom used them once for a fresh pot, then a second time for a not-so-fresh pot. Afterward, she carefully packed up the grounds and gave them to my grandmother, who squeezed out whatever caffeine was left for a third pot, thankful that her family had coffee at all.)

But like so many of that generation, Dorothy climbed into the middle class, working a good-paying factory job, marrying a man who did the same and frugally saving until they could buy a tidy ranch in a rural swath of Northeast Ohio where they lived for 50 years.

Life was good until last summer when Dorothy fell over picking strawberries in her garden and bonked her head on a stone.

She ended up in the hospital and shortly after, her husband, Lou, fell and broke his ankle.

Dorothy is home now, isolated, unable to drive because her fickle heart sometimes frolics causing her to faint. And Lou is in a nursing home 12 miles away, confused and calling daily, begging her to pick him up, unsure what he’s done to be sent away from his wife and the home he loves.

Happy Birthday? That, to me, implies Dorothy’s past year was swell and her next year — if there is a next year — will be better.

Nevertheless, a birthday card is necessary. If mom doesn’t send one, it’s more than a slight. It’s an invisible white flag conceding life has ended for both mom and Dorothy even though each continues to breathe.

So, as a pharmacist bagged up 28 prescription refills for mom and dad yesterday, I pawed through racks of birthday cards.

I first gravitated toward a slew of funny, acerbic old lady cards that mom and Dorothy would have happily picked for one another just a decade ago. But jokes about diapers or forgetting your name aren’t funny when they’re true.

Next I discovered a whole birthday genre dedicated to: “We’re both so busy, I never tell you how special you are.” Inappropriate when life turns into a series of medical appointments with naps and tv in between.

The rest were a hodge-podge encouraging the birthday girl to party, to swill wine until drunk or to do something special or naughty just for herself. No. No. And double no.

At least 80 cards into my card safari, I abandoned the hunt. I paid the pharmacy clerk $500-plus for drugs extending my own parents’ not-so-pleasant lives and hauled my mini-drugstore home, hundreds of pills in bottles rattling like tiny, sad maracas.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this card problem. Since my parents moved in, I have been their personal shopper for all cards and gifts they give to each other and anyone else (including me).

Anniversary, Christmas, Sweetest Day (an Ohio tradition concocted generations ago by a clever local chocolatier): Each holiday is filled with land mines and chasms of time that neither candy nor warm bathrobes can cross.

Even buying cards for them is impossible. Most cards grown children give their parents involve “thanks”– thank you for all that you do, thank you for supporting me, thank you for bringing joy to our lives.

I’ve given scores of these sorts of thank-you cards to mom and dad over the years. And I thank them now for being the parents they have been. But the sad truth is, they should be giving me and my husband these thank-you cards now.

And that’s impossible because I would have to buy them. And I wouldn’t, fearing that such a move would trigger a weird psychological echo chamber, maybe even a worm hole for unplanned traveling through time.

But picking out sympathy cards is the worst. And I buy a lot of sympathy cards. Being in your 80s — like my parents are — is not unlike being in your 20s. But you’re sending sympathy cards and attending funerals instead of buying shower gifts and toasting with bad wedding champagne.

Of course it’s sad when anyone loses someone they love. But what is the appropriate sentiment when someone’s body dies years after their brain withered, leaving them a shell? Or when a person, who has longed for the Grim Reaper’s visit, dies after years of suffering, pain and loneliness?

Those passings, I always think to myself, should be celebrated (even if bittersweet).

Unlike so many birthdays, which now seem better off mourned.

Poor Dorothy.

I don’t know what we’re going to drop in the mail this year.

Maybe a blank card, scrawled with words of love and an old photo of better times, a snapshot of her and Lou smiling alongside mom and dad, martinis raised in jubilation.

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Life can be ugly and unpredictable: Pick a husband who will last — and laugh with you — a lifetime

The first time I introduced Skip to my parents, I knew I wanted to marry him.

It was October 1998 and my future husband was not in peak form.

He — like his mother and most everyone on her Hungarian side of the family — had developed a painful cyst at the base of his spine. A few days earlier, a doctor carved a 4-inch zig-zag incision, scooped out the culprit and sewed Skip back up with what looked like an embroidered lightning bolt emerging from the top of his butt crack.

It wasn’t pretty.

And Skip was in pain. By the time we pulled into my parents’ driveway, he was ashen and sitting side-saddle because leaning against the driver’s seat hurt too much.

My mom, I had warned Skip, had no social boundaries. None. She was nosy, touchy and, at times, a wee bit raunchy. But she could also be witty and disarmingly charming.

When mom saw Skip limping up the back stairs, she greeted him with a smile and an innocuous question: “What’s the matter?”

Skip explained about the cyst.

And before Skip could shake my father’s hand, mom walloped him with round two — the inappropriate question, the one I was certain would come even though I couldn’t predict the circumstances or the timing — “Can I see it?”

Skip, without hesitation, unbuckled his belt, dropped his jeans and let mom peel down the dressing so she could marvel at his wounded anatomy.

“Herm,” mom said to my father, “come here, you have to see this.”

My dad, politely averting his eyes, declined and asked Skip — in manly solidarity — if he wanted a beer.

Skip and I were in our early 30s then. My parents were in their late 60s. None of us could have imagined what the future held. But that moment — and the hours that followed — set the tone for all the years that followed, including the past three since my parents moved in with us.

Many readers of this blog have left messages and sent emails of encouragement to me. They say I am brave to help my parents and that my parents are lucky to have me.

But the truth is, my parents are lucky to have my husband.

If Skip didn’t support me — financially and emotionally — I couldn’t help my parents. He also pitches in daily to get things done. Today, on his day off, he took mom on a field trip to the library and listened patiently as she yammered on with two people she knew — even after those people seemed to lose interest.

How many books and movies — both comic and tragic – have been penned about Romeo and Juliet relationships doomed by quarreling or misfit Meet the Focker families? There’s a reason.

Even if you find a soul mate, a lover, a best friend, you’re destined for trouble if your match doesn’t fit with your family. Yes, couples can muddle through. And, for some, family isn’t as important. But I knew, particularly as an only child, that my husband would need both the right mindset and sense of humor to not only cope with my family, but to be happy with me.

I was already in love with Skip before I took him home to meet my parents. But as that day wore on — without tension, only laughter — I knew I would be his wife.

After mom re-bandaged his incision and Skip hoisted up his jeans, mom, who has no science or medical training, told Skip that his cyst wasn’t hereditary.

It was, she declared, his unborn twin.

Mom, now with dad on her side, told the story of a man they knew in Florida who had the same sort of cyst. When doctors operated, they found hair, tiny teeth and bones. Doctors concluded that the man’s body formed the cyst to expel the remains of a twin he had unknowingly carried with him for decades since birth.

Skip didn’t argue. He didn’t talk about all of his family members with the same issue. Or that, thankfully, his doctors did not report finding any teeth lodged above his butt crack.

Only later, when we were alone, did we laugh, not realizing at the time that his lightning-bolt scar would forever be known in our family as “twin.”

Learning to speak dementia: Stop the pop quizzes, just let people talk — about the black guy nobody likes or anything else

I found out a couple of months ago that my parents’ annual physical exam now includes a 20-question pop quiz after a weigh-in and blood pressure check.

My 104-pound mom with high blood pressure tackled it first.

Doctor: What year were you born?

Mom: 1932

Doctor: Where are we?

Mom: Medina, I’ve lived here most of my life

Doctor: Who is the President of the United States?

Mom paused. She glared at dad, glanced at me and then rolled her eyes at the doctor and blurted: “I voted for him — you know, that black guy nobody likes.”

Her embarrassment exploded silently, flooding the tiny examination room with a muddle of fear and shame.

The doctor, who has taken care of my parents for decades, tried to paper over the moment with reassurances. But there was no consoling mom, who, against my father’s wishes, had hammered a gaggle of Barack Obama campaign signs into their front yard in 2008.

This doctor’s visit happened in December and I hadn’t thought about it much again until an Iowa-based gerontologist I follow — Elaine Eshbaugh — wrote about something similar in her witty, insightful, in-the-trenches blog “Welcome to Dementialand.”

In it, Eshbaugh described stopping to talk to a nursing home patient after the woman hollered to Eshbaugh that she had become a grandma.

When Eshbaugh asked the woman what her granddaughter’s name was, the woman — like my mother searching for an answer her brain couldn’t come up with — paused and flashed from happy to sad. She couldn’t remember.

Pop quizzes, it turns out, don’t only happen in doctors’ offices.

They happen daily and inadvertently when many of us talk to people with dementia.

When we ask grandpa if he recognizes us, or grandma what she had for breakfast, we’re quizzing them. And if they can’t answer — when they get that sad and shameful look — they know they’ve failed.

I’ve been too thick to realize how often I do this with my own family.

Mom, I ask, where did you put the newspaper? Dad, I prod, don’t you remember you had a stent when you were in the hospital two years ago?

Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if I found the newspaper without asking? Or recognize and embrace that I’m now, and forever more, dad’s medical memory?

Eshbaugh concedes, she, too, has unnecessarily caused angst in dementia patients — including the woman in the nursing home who became a grandmother.

“Instead of asking her to recall specific info about her granddaughter, I should have said, ‘Tell me more about your granddaughter’,” Eshbaugh said.

“She might have told me that she was 8 pounds when she was born, that she had blond hair, that she cries a lot,” Eshbaugh said. “But she would be focusing on what she remembered rather than what she didn’t remember.”

That’s a good lesson for most of us.

My parents’ doctor, of course, doesn’t have that option. She is measuring memory function and a quiz is necessary.

After mom fumbled the president question in the office that day, the doc continued down a list of other queries, swapping out a World War I question for one she thought both mom and dad should know since they lived through it.

Doctor: When was D-Day?

Mom stumbled into an answer involving the 1800s and dad, trying to save her, reminded her that was the Civil War.

“Abraham Lincoln was a wonderful president,” mom said, telling the doctor she was confused now about dates because she doesn’t work any more and has no reason to keep track of time.

A few minutes later, as the doctor was typing into her laptop and the three of us were sitting quietly nearby, mom lit up.

She had found the needle buried in 82 years of memory haystack.

“Obama,” she said triumphantly, pounding her bony, little fist on the arm of her wheelchair. “His name is Obama.”

For anyone interested, here’s a link to Elaine Eshbaugh’s refreshing Welcome to Dementialand blog: https://welcometodementialand.wordpress.com

Suicide is painless: Damn you, Hawkeye Pierce!

“Suicide is painless” — I wake up humming — “it brings on many changes.”

“And I can take or leave it as I please.”

Cue helicopters.

No worries. I’m not offing myself. I’d have a much angrier theme song if suicide was my plan.

It’s just that song, that horrible TV theme song, is nibbling at my brain, sucking out my soul.

I’ve  been trapped in a 1970s, olive-drab time warp for weeks after Netflix released five years worth of M*A*S*H episodes.

Every night after dinner, my parents tune into Hawkeye, Hot Lips and Frank Burns (well, now Charles Winchester III).

And I’m suddenly thrust into this bizarro world where I’m doing dishes and waiting, hoping for them to go to bed….while my mom and dad are eating Oreos and giggling at the TV.

When M*A*S*H first aired, I was 6-years-old and the roles were most assuredly reversed. I prefer the role of couch-dweller.

Caregiving — a term I despise for myriad reasons, but have no word yet to put in its place — is slowly ruining swaths of pop culture and other joys for me.

When mom and dad first moved in, mom would often fall when she got out of bed. I had to come up with something to alert me before her feet touched the ground so I could help her.

There are a lot of devices on the market, but almost all depend on weight. They don’t sound an alert until the person is standing.

My solution? A driveway alarm that sounds if something (presumably a car) breaks a beam.

My husband mounted the part of the device that shoots the beam on mom’s bedside table. And every time mom swung her feet across the beam, the alarm — which I programmed to play my favorite song at the time, Rickie Lee Jones’ “The Moon is Made of Gold” — would play from a device on my bedside table.

“Don’t feel bad because the sun went down, the night has wealth untold,” Rickie Lee crooned, gently waking me for the first time each night mom was getting up.

“You just keep watching, and you soon will see,” Rickie Lee poked me awake the second time mom stirred.

“The moon is made of gold,” Rickie Lee’s chorus only arrived on my third wake-up of the night, usually drawing an exhausted single-word response from me: “Bullshit!”

This continued for months.

And now, I’m probably the only person in the world who gets visibly angry when she hears happy-go-lucky Rickie Lee Jones sing anything.

I’ve since learned to be careful mixing my favorites with anything caregiver related.

Can’t go to flea markets or antique shops because they all seem to have the same musty odor, however, faint, as my parents’ house when we cleaned it out.

Can’t stand the smell of gravy, a standard in dinners I cook for mom and dad. It makes me nauseous. My husband and I have gone vegan.

Can’t love my own, lovely front stoop — carefully painted and planted to be inviting — as my parents have seized it with outdoor furniture as smoking central.

Luckily, M*A*S*H was never a favorite.

I was a little nostalgic when mom and dad first started binge watching, but any sentimentality  evaporated by Season 3.

Now, pity Alan Alda should our paths ever cross.

One of these days, Hawkeye. Pow! Right to the moon.

I know it’s not made of gold.

Would you let a nursing home kitchen assistant negotiate medical care for your mom and dad? Some are.

When my dad and I were waiting for his daily cancer radiation treatment yesterday, a gangly, good-natured kid wheeled a woman into the room and parked next to us.

He was in his early 20s and could have passed for the woman’s grandson the way he doted on her, tucking a hand-crocheted blanket around her shoulders, making sure she had enough water to drink because a medical condition dried out her mouth.

But he was an employee at the nursing home where the woman lived — the highest-rated facility in our county and one of the best in all of Greater Cleveland. Hopeful residents each fork over about $5,000 to get on the facility’s waiting list and often spend years elsewhere before a space opens in independent, assisted-living, nursing or memory care units.

After a nurse wheeled the woman away for radiation, the young man told us he started working in the nursing home’s kitchen in 2009. A few months ago, one of the nursing home’s two transportation jobs opened up and he landed it.

He figured it would be a simple job, driving the residents — about 300 — to places they needed to go. But it has turned out to be much more complicated.

All of residents have lots of medical appointments and besides the transport obstacles — safely getting people on walkers, canes and in wheelchairs into and out of offices through ice and snow — most need help handling their insurance and medical questions and answers with doctors and nurses.

What? My face froze.

So you not only drive them, you act as their representative at doctors’ appointments, I asked, just to make sure I understood.

Yes, he said, shaking his head. It’s a shame, he said, how so many families absolve themselves of all responsibilities once a loved one is ensconced at a nursing facility.

A few minutes later, dad and I were sitting in another room with his oncologist. Dad told her he had started having pain in his esophagus near where his tumor is. She said she would write a prescription for a soothing serum to coat his throat that contained Benadryl as one of its main ingredients.

Wait, I interrupted, dad already takes one Benadryl pill every night before bed to help him sleep. Couldn’t that be a problem?

Yes, she said. Dad should stop taking the nighttime Benadryl because taken together, the serum and the Benadryl, could cause him to fall.

A fall — even though dad’s cancer is at Stage 3 and only being treated palliatively — is more likely to kill dad than his cancer, another oncologist told us after dad asked him how he would likely die (the other most likely way is aspiration).

So this seemingly simply Benadryl mix-up couple have been an early death sentence.

Would the good-natured nursing home transport driver have caught this potential medical mistake if he took dad to this radiation appointment? Doubtful.

I’m a veteran newspaper reporter — trained in both reporting facts and asking tough questions — and I have a difficult time managing medical care for my parents, two people I love.

How would a kitchen assistant turned driver manage this for strangers? And why should anyone expect him to?

No matter how good his intentions are — and they seemed exceedingly good — the nursing home driver has no medical training and far too many residents to know each of their medical needs and vulnerabilities.

Later, on our drive home, I asked dad if he was surprised how that nursing home depended on its drivers. No, he said, but he thought it sad, especially considering how much people pay for their care.

The nursing home driver told us the woman he brought to radiation that day shells out more than $8,000 a month. More skilled nursing care or the memory unit — a separate, locked-down facility for dementia patients — costs residents much more, he said.

What do residents get for that money? Some were on a field trip to nearby Harry London Chocolates that day to see how bon bond and chocolate-covered pretzels are made. Tonight, a group of residents is putting on a stage show open to the public.

And one day a week — the day many residents live for — the lobby is filled with therapy dogs who wag and lick away loneliness and fear.

All of that is fantastic. It’s also a clean, well-run facility where many residents feel a kinship with staff. I know. My aunt was a resident and I’ve been a visitor.

Yet none of this makes up for a kitchen assistant being promoted to a driver whose job also includes negotiating residents’ off-site medical care.

Dancing behind — and in front of — the Grim Reaper

The night before I started my first newspaper reporting job in 1990, my grandfather died.

I didn’t mention it to my new colleagues. And they may have never known, but this was my hometown newspaper and my first assignment was obituary duty.

When the funeral director — the only one in town — called, I carefully jotted down the information about my 91-year-old grandfather’s services and quickly puddled into tears a few minutes later when I pulled a photo from newspaper archives to run with the story of his death.

And so began my newspaper career, much of it an awkward and uncomfortable dance behind the Grim Reaper.

I never wrote many obituaries — although I always enjoyed it.

When a reporter calls family and friends of a dead person for an obit, people usually welcome the interest, rattling off tales of heroism, humor and generosity.

If you can keep the conversation going long enough to cut through the worthless surface platitudes, you’ll find that everyone — from prostitute to priest — has at least one moment (or more likely, many moments) of his/her life that’s worth reporting.

Lost love, found treasures, unshakeable secrets or a double-life exposed.

But much of my reporting career has been devoted to a different kind of death story: The aftermath of violent or other newsworthy passings — homicides, terrorist attacks, horrific accidents — and the people who are to blame.

Reporters mostly dread these stories because no one wants to talk. People hang up on and slam doors in their faces.

That aspect wears on me, too, but I had unconventional training that so calloused me, I can push forward when other reporters sometimes give up. In college, I worked as both a telemarketer and door-to-door fundraiser. I was cussed out, chased off property by people and dogs and once, threatened by a woman who said she had a gun.

Hang-ups and slammed doors are nothing.

I’ve written about the foreign terrorists and those they killed on 9/11; and the domestic terrorists and those they killed bombing the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

I’ve covered men hunting down and killing their wives in front of their children. And teens not yet old enough to drive killing others at random.

In Cincinnati, I wrote the story of a Holocaust survivor impaled on her own femurs when the elevator she and her weekly card group were riding in plunged into the basement of an apartment building.

In North Carolina, I unfurled the story of a mentally ill World War II veteran who killed his bunkmate with a machete in the 1940s and then used a metal walker to beat to death a World War I veteran at a Veterans Administration nursing facility in the 1990s.

And in Ohio, I helped piece together the horrific story of a woman — pretending to be pregnant — kidnapping and killing her pregnant neighbor so she could pass off the nearly full-term baby as her own.

You’d think I would have learned something about death, grieving or human nature over 25 years.

But I haven’t.

Every conversation about these kinds of deaths is uncomfortable and awkward.

Every word written a chore.

Now, for the first time I find myself dancing in front of the Grim Reaper — caring for my dad with cancer and my mom with dementia before they die.

Obituaries are supposed to be the easy kind of death stories to write.

My parents are in their 80s. They have lots of life moments worth sharing.

There are no calls to make, no doors to knock on.

I am both the reporter and the source for their death stories.

Yet I can’t figure out the first word to write.

I told my dad today he has cancer. Why me? Because the doc who found it apparently didn’t think my father was worth his time

Dad has a tumor on his esophagus that is almost certainly cancer.

Esophageal cancer killed my dad’s father at age 91. It killed my mom’s mother at age 83, which is how old my dad is now.

This cancer, my family knows, is an ugly way to die.

Yet the doctor who discovered the tumor didn’t talk to my dad about it, didn’t look him in the eye and answer his questions.

The doctor instead foisted that burden on me — by phone.

Before I started writing this blog about my outrage, I spoke with four R.N.s — three who work in different departments at the hospital where my dad is, plus an oncology nurse at another facility. I told each how my dad’s diagnosis unfolded today because I wanted to make sure my anger is justified, not just fueled by my fear and grief over the cancer.

Each assured me that my ire was righteous. Three called the doctor’s behavior unprofessional. I call it cold.

Judge for yourself. Here’s what happened:

I wheeled mom into dad’s hospital room just after 2 p.m. He had just returned from having an endoscopy, a procedure in which a doctor inserts a flexible tube with a light and camera attached to scope the digestive track.

This test, we hoped, would reveal the source of dad’s acute blood loss  — which had become so severe the test was pushed back a couple of hours so dad could receive a blood transfusion.

I told the nurse helping my dad I wanted to be there when the doctor came to the room with the results and asked her to get an approximate time because I had to run my mother one-floor up for a scheduled iron infusion at 2:45 p.m. and didn’t want to miss him.

The nurse, who was very helpful, hadn’t been able to reach the doctor by 2:40 p.m., so I scurried upstairs with mom and then rushed back downstairs to wait with dad.

When the nurse saw me, she assured me she was still trying track down the doctor. A few minutes later, the phone in dad’s room rang and the nurse bolted in saying it was the doctor on the line.

The doctor — whom I have never met, but who is part of the gastro practice that both my mother and father use — never asked to speak with my father, nor did he offer an explanation about why he didn’t stop to see us before leaving the hospital.

He instead told me he discovered a tumor that was almost certainly cancerous on my dad’s esophagus. The doctor didn’t have the results of the biopsies yet, but he already called in two oncologists to consult.

I was stunned. I figured a phone call was good news, or at least neutral news — maybe he wanted to run more tests. But not this. A doctor doesn’t drop the cancer bomb by phone.

So I slipped into my most comfortable suit of emotional armor — my newspaper reporter facade — and grabbed a nub of broken pencil from my dad’s bed tray and started asking questions.

The doctor spelled the names of the oncologists for me and told me what would likely happen next — a CAT scan, the assigning a “stage” to the cancer and a treatment plan.

All of this, of course, is happening at the bedside of my dad, who is listening to my side of the conversation and trying to figure out what was going on.

Was this the source of dad’s blood loss, I asked, trying not to say the word cancer until I could talk to dad.

The tumor he found was covered in dried blood, but wasn’t actively bleeding, the doctor said.

Tumors, he told me, bleed intermittently.

The phone call lasted less than three minutes.

When I hung up, I told dad he had cancer.

Dad asked a couple of questions that I had no answers for.

A few minutes later, I picked up mom from her iron infusion on the floor above and told her dad has cancer.

She, too, had questions I had no answers for.

Is this the way medicine is supposed to work?

P.S. I haven’t yet decided whether to post the doctor’s name. I most certainly will write letters to his medical partners and the president of the hospital where this happened. We are not using the oncologists this doctor brought in for consultation.

Wheelchair lunacy: Even a new medical center and docs can’t get it right

My mom and dad’s doctor moved into a stunning new medical building about three years ago. It sits up on a hill, surrounded by woods. It has its own helicopter pad, a full-service emergency room and a chemotherapy wing, along with offices for dozens of physicians.

Yet — the wheelchairs provided in the lobby of the building don’t fit through the entrance doorways to the doctors’ offices.

How stunningly stupid is that? A medical facility — where almost half the parking places are designated for handicapped, oncology and expectant mothers — that doesn’t match its doorway widths to the wheelchairs it uses.

I should point out that all wheelchairs provided are super-sized, about 40 percent wider than standard.

The easiest fix, of course, is to provide some standard wheelchairs, too. But the proper fix is to widen the doorways for those who do depend on the larger chairs.

As it is, overburdened caregivers like myself (or worse — the elderly trying to care for their more fragile elderly loved ones) must lift their own wheelchairs in and out of their cars to visit a building of healthcare workers who should be attuned to the needs of their patients.

I don’t know what patients do who need the wider chairs. Do doctors examine them in the hallways? Sad.

It could be worse, of course. My parents’ longtime podiatrist put his office in an older home that sits on a slope off of a mostly residential street. No wheelchairs are provided. It’s a small building, so I understand why.

But the challenge here is gravity: Getting mom from inside the car, to a wheelchair and then into the office (and the reverse) is  more of a battle. And if I forget the wheelchair brake or it slips, there could be disaster — a runaway wreck into a manicured flower bed between the small parking lot and the street.

I thought my parents’ gastro doctors got it right in their relatively new three-story complex. At the entry, there’s a large button to push which is supposed to open the doors so someone in a wheelchair can easily roll through.

That button hasn’t worked since my first visit with my parents — three years ago.

Please, stop sending dreamcatchers: Or, how I tried to tame charities asking for money

Our mailman, Chet, already struggled to deliver the bevy of catalogs my husband and I generated when it was just the two of us.

But after my parents moved in, Chet fled the U.S. Postal Service for a career in nursing. I always imagined his job change was fueled in part by the stacks and stacks of mail my parents received from charity and non-profit groups seeking money.

Giving money to organizations you believe in, groups that have a proven track record and groups that wisely spend your money  is admirable.

But we were pummeled with pleas from scores of charities, from the established SPCA to some group that claimed to help armless children paint with their toes. (These groups asked for money on the phone, too, but that’s a whole other story).

So we cut back on giving. Way back. I used the free website guidestar.com to ferret out the good charities from the bad.

Guidestar lets users look at the recent tax records for almost all charities and non-prodfit groups. Most of the tax forms list the salaries and benefits of the top-paid charity officials, along with how the group spends its money.

It’s an eye-opener. I was disappointed to see that some respected charities we had supported spent more than 35 percent of their donations on salaries and overhead instead using that money for good works.Those charities fell off our giving list.

So did the charities that didn’t provide the tax forms on Guidestar: No transparency means no cash from us.

After about a year, the mailed pleas for money dramatically slowed.

But the most persistent never gave up.

About a year before my parents moved in, I noticed dreamcatchers and small clay pots popping up among the Amish-made furniture and family treasures at their house.

My mom said these items were tokens of appreciation from a Native American charity she supported somewhere out west.

Thick packets of mailed info and dreamcatchers from the group — I forget its name — followed mom and dad to our house.

This group, for whatever reason, didn’t make our giving list. And when the dreamcatchers continued arriving, I asked the group to kindly stop contacting our family and to take us off its donor list.

I thought it worked for awhile, but then I found out my husband was throwing the group’s missives in the trash rather than raise  my ire.

Today is Jan. 6. It’s been nearly three years since we’ve given money to the group. But odds are, by month’s end we’ll be the recipients of another unwanted dreamcatcher.