Food storage gone seriously wrong...

I spent the afternoon helping a dear elderly sister clean out her freezer. It had gotten so iced over inside that the door would not unlock. The door had to be removed entirely and serious work undertaken to put all items into ice chests (about a dozen of them!) for safe keeping so the freezer could be thawed and cleaned. That all happened before I got there. Once everything got taken out, my friend became quite overwhelmed by the project and called me, her trusty VT, for reinforcements.

Little did I know that a simple act of service for a lady I dearly love would become such an ethical dilemma.

The freezer had been tightly packed with boxes and bags and containers of every kind you might imagine. A LARGE portion of those items were dated prior to 2004. A SIGNFICANT portion were dated around 1986 and then on up through the 90's.

And my friend insisted it was all perfectly good.

These jars and bags and boxes were totally encased in thick layers of ice. She was picking them up and whacking each one with a hammer to knock the ice of, taking a peek to try to figure out what it might be, then carefully re-labeling to put each thing back in her freezer. She had finally realized that process would take her all day long and stuff would start to melt, so that's why she called me. She wanted help in the process.

I tried to reason with this dear lady that any food more than two years old really should be thrown away. She was insistent that she wanted it all. I tried to be kind about it, but was very firm that we must at least throw away anything dated from the past century. Anything that bore a date of 1999 or before I would put in a box and cart off to my dumpster for her. She did NOT like that. But grudgingly went along with it, and then questioned each and every thing I started to throw away - saying "oh this one looks pretty good!"

I started giving her tasks to remove her from the work area ("could you please get me another towel to wipe these?" or "I think this marking pen is going dry - would you mind going to get another?" and then I would quickly toss out as much as I could before her return. My husband was there also, a party to my "crime." As soon as I could get a full box ready to go I'd have him load it into our car out of her view. We filled then entire back of our SUV with very old, very freezer burned, very dead nasty looking food for disposal. But we did it in a pretty sneaky way.

So I'm wondering about this... was it my place to do that? Darn right! or was it?

Which leads to the larger issues of how we deal with people we love who lose their judgment as they grow older. At what point do we "younguns" have the right to impose our values and wishes over what they may prefer? How do we say "You really should not drive any more" or "it's not safe for you to live alone" to someone who very much wants to maintain independence, but in our eyes seems to be a danger to themselves or others?

This dear lady is increasingly showing signs of not being able to care for herself or her property. Her family are all totally flumoxed about what to do about it, because any time they make suggestions for other arrangments "grandma" will have no part of it. At what point do they insist?

I am a firm advocate of honoring our elders. And I'll be the first to admit there are plenty of people in their 2o's, 30's, 40's or 50's who have shown poor judgment in a variety of ways that I would never consider putting into an assisted living facility. But when someone is 80 and had previously been sharp yet now is frequently confused or forgetful it seems to be an entirely different playing field.

I have no fear of death, but I am terrified of being left alone as a fragile, dependent person in my senior years. I wonder and worry at times about whether I will live with chronic illness or if I will lose my lucid mind. One thing I do know for sure. If I ever get to the point that I'm keeping 20 yr old food in my freezer and refusing to get rid of anything so much so that my house becomes a wild, haphazard warren of newspapers, special TV offers and old ice cream containers, I'd very much appreciate it if SOMEONE would step up and intervene rather than worrying they might hurt my feelings.