Caring till the living end

No place like that place where happy memories warm the heart and soothe the soul. It's the place where happy, giggling children blew out birthday candles and where the kitchen was so often filled with the sweet warm aromas of homemade blueberry jam.

"A home is more than just furniture and four walls," says Dennis Jobson as he sits in his mother's empty armchair. "It's where your heart is - it's history."

A single tear slides across his cheek as he looks around the cozy living room where an old lady's trinkets abound. A tiny porcelain angel, a delicate china rose tea set, a framed letter from the prime minister congratulating her 75th birthday.

This is the cozy room where Jobson's mother, Margaret, spent the last days of her life. But without the help of her son, she would have had to sell it all, pack up her memories in a cardboard box, and move to a nursing home.

"I didn't want to take all that away from her," said Jobson. "She loved her home. A nursing home is just a transitional place between life and death - she would have hated that."

For 14 years Jobson, 37, cared for his mother until she died last July at 77 after a battle with cancer, four heart attacks and two strokes. Near the end it was almost a 24-hour-a-day job - a job he says was a gift from God that many families simply can't afford.

"God allowed me to do a wonderful thing here," he said. And while he and his mother were not wealthy, he says there was always enough money to get by so that he could stay home to care for his mother in the last years rather than go out to work.

He blames the government for not offering support to other families who too often have to send their parents away from everything that is familiar to spend those final years in a hospital or nursing home.

"They just need a little help - and the government keeps cutting, cutting, cutting."

While some aging parents have welcomed the shift to a nursing home, the majority would rather stay home, and would do anything to do so. But many can't without government home-care services which provides health workers who come in to the home to provide crucial care, which lifts some of the burden off the family.

In Jobson's case he wouldn't have made it without a community care worker who came 12 hours a week to bathe or feed his mother because near the end she could not walk or feed herself.

But alas, community care funding has flatlined recently, while the provincial budget for nursing homes increased by $60-million over the next two years.

"It doesn't make sense," he said. "What the government seems to fail to understand is that by helping me keep my mother at home instead of at a hospital or nursing home the government saves a huge amount of money. Not only that, but my mother lived a longer, happier life because of it."

Jobson said he remembers the day when his own grandmother was sent off to a nursing home. "She had to leave all of her memories behind," he said. "It broke her heart and she died of a heart attack shortly after. I knew then that I wouldn't let that happen to my mother."

He sinks deeper into his mother's comfortable old chair, suddenly chuckles, and looks off into space. He remembered when she was in the hospital after a stroke and a speech therapist couldn't get her to speak - but back at home a little Frank Sinatra worked wonders. "All of a sudden Sinatra came on the radio and she started to sing her heart out," he said. "She knew all the words and she sang beautifully."

She loved to stay home and listen to Sinatra and big band music, she loved to sing, and most of all, she loved God, he says. "It wasn't just that she worshiped God or that she respected God - she loved God," he said, remembering the calm that would come over her face when she prayed.

As if eager to share just a little of his mother to the rest of the world, he flips through precious albums - small reminders of his mother's last years. Photographs of a frail looking white-haired lady with a glitter in her eyes that gave little glimpses of who she was: mom curled up in a cozy blue blanket, mom eating an ice cream cone, mom smelling a rose, mom laughing, her last birthday cake, her last Mother's Day, then finally, at the end of the album, the obituary that ran in the paper and ended with a special request: "In lieu of flowers, please simply make the time to spend some time with someone who you care for, and cherish them."

Jobson will never forget how his mother looked on her last day on earth. She had just dozed off after reciting the Lord's Prayer.

"I looked at her and her face looked incredibly youthful. It was a look of joy and profound peace and I knew she was getting ready to die. I leaned over and kissed her forehead and said goodbye." Hours later, she passed away.

Tears well up in his eyes again. There is a sadness in the room. And a kind of warmth. The warmth that comes from sheer, undiluted, love.