After every visit I was overcome with guilt that I was not doing more for my parents. I knew it was impossible but still I couldn’t banish these tormenting thoughts. (Photos: Shutterstock)

It was the day of a huge blizzard. Schools were canceled roads were closed and the city was practically shut down. That day exactly two employees showed up at the normally bustling office where I work: my supervisor and me.

“The people who were raised by parents who don’t know the meaning of giving up” was the way my supervisor summed up the two of us.

It was an apt description of my parents. Having grown up in the post-Depression era they embodied the values of hard work and self-sufficiency. My father who worked as a manager of a large department store didn’t balk at doing any menial tasks if the employee in charge hadn’t shown up. He got up every morning to daven k’vasikin and could not understand how anyone could sleep late. My mother never hired cleaning help even though she worked outside the house and also spent much of her time helping her disabled brother.

My parents continued working and being active well into their seventies. While their work hours were no longer as intense as they had been in earlier years they both filled their every waking minute with activities that were meaningful to them like volunteer work. They scoffed at the notion of retirement.

In his late seventies my father had a severe stroke that left him cognitively impaired and physically weakened. He became forgetful lost much of his ability to communicate and often couldn’t walk beyond the driveway. In such a situation the obvious thing to do is to hire an aide at least part-time. But to my mother that was anathema. She was determined to be his caregiver and nothing anyone said could convince her out of it. What made things even more complicated was that she was terrified of signing away her assets into a trust which my brothers and I urged her to do so that she and my father could become eligible for Medicaid and home healthcare assistance. She insisted on maintaining the status quo even if it meant forgoing a slew of much-needed government programs.

I am an only daughter. I have one brother who lives in Eretz Yisrael and one brother who lives across the country. They visit once in a while but there’s no way for them to be involved in helping my parents consistently. I live in an established frum community a three-hour drive from my parents who reside in a small out-of-the-way community a considerable drive from shuls kosher stores and doctors’ offices.

As long as they were both able to walk and drive it was fine. But now that my father could no longer drive and my mother had to be home to ensure he was safe every outing became a big problem. Once a week my mother went out to her exercise class and she schlepped Daddy along with her leaving him sitting in the lobby with some men who were awaiting physiotherapy appointments. Other than that shopping and errands were sorely neglected.