Come on, Dad, gimme the car

Dealing with families and transportation

When I was 17, my father regularly yelled at me about the car: after I took it out, he expected me to turn down the volume on the radio, push the seat back, and replace the gas that I used.

When I was 50, I called my father’s doctor and asked him to have my father evaluated for driving. (The receptionist would not confirm that he was a patient, of course, but did put a note in the file.) This was after a harrowing ride with me and some of my nieces and nephews as passengers. My father was driving 20 miles an hour on roads with a posted speed limit of 40, stopping at green lights and basically ignoring cars in intersections. Afterward, my little nephew reported to his mother, “Someone gave Grandad the finger.”

That was the least of it.

It turned out that my father had a glioblastoma, and that was the last time he drove. My mother had been trying to come up with a way to get him to stop driving, but couldn’t. It took a near-crisis to force the issue.

Like a lot of people in his generation, my father was a car guy. He gave up his Pontiac convertible when he had kids, but then he had a company car (always a Buick or an Oldsmobile). He negotiated labor contracts for a living, so he enjoyed the process of haggling with dealers. He kept his cars clean, too; even with five kids, we never drove around in a mobile trash can.

The brain tumor probably clouded my father’s judgement. Several years before, one of his cousins had been driving around while legally blind, to the horror of the entire family. She didn’t want to put anyone out by asking for a ride, and she lived in an area where she could not run errands on foot or by public transit. Everyone, including my father, said that it was a terrible situation. Terrible!

In the last century, all but a handful of American cities have been made over to cars. This makes it really hard to handle relatives who should no longer drive. But it’s not impossible.

I have terrible vision. A few years ago, I reached a point when I could not drive at night. I told the optometrist and was prescribed prismatic lenses that were not cheap but made a huge difference. This is a good first step if driving becomes difficult. I also know that at some point, my vision won’t be correctable, and then I’ll need to stop driving.

My mother-in-law still drives, but she will not take highways. This is a bit of a hassle because she lives in the far suburbs and we live in the city, but it’s also a blessing that she has willingly reduced her driving. She plans to move and then give up the car entirely. In the meantime, she has become a huge fan of Uber and Lyft.

If someone in your life shouldn’t be driving, you have a few tactics to try, depending on their health situation and where they live. Consider taking them to the eye doctor or asking their internist to talk to them. Show them how to use Uber, Lyft, and delivery apps. Tell them that the car needs to be fixed and then whisk it away. The National Institute on Aging has some ideas for talking to someone with dementia.

Good luck. We need more public transit and more walkable communities, but it may be another century before we revert to our pre-car existence.