Balance and possibilities

Chapter 246

Balancing work and elder care

This can be complexified a great deal if you generally live far away from your elder. I live about 5000 miles away on another continent. So if you find yourself on the wrong side of the ocean in a crisis, getting there quickly is impossible. International travel is usually at least a two day process for us.

On the other hand, with technology, we can talk every single day as long as we want, pretty much effortlessly. In the three and a half years this elder care has been my responsibility, we have talked about 70 minutes on the phone every single day I am not physically here. This would have been unthinkable when we were living in Russia 25 years ago. And actually impossible from where we lived. And even if it had been possible, it would have been astronomically expensive (the monthly call from our neighbor’s house, to our kids at the boarding school ran about $300 an hour).

Yesterday was a perfect example of how effortless this is in the modern world. I am with the elder I am caring for at the moment, and my wife called from Eastern Europe (where she is working) and we were video chatting over lunch together when a client called from Berlin and so we got off our daily video chat and I rang the client back in Berlin. All from rural Georgia, where we are surrounded by far more cows than people, all while doing my elder care.

There is no balance, but there are possibilities.