Changing Places

A baby boomer named Sarah is nearing retirement. But before she can embrace it, there comes a day that would be forever etched into her mind: it was the day she received a call from her mother's friend.

"Had she talked with her mother lately?" the friend gently asked.

Something was very wrong.

As Sarah drives back home, a sense of extreme dread overwhelms her. She prays but can't seem to shake the heaviness. What she finds when she arrives is devastating. Her mother has had a stroke, which has ravaged her executive decision-making more so than her physical abilities.

Sarah had tried to warn her mother that she needed to take better care of her medical conditions but was always met with the reply that her mother wasn't afraid to die. Sarah could not get her mother to understand that a stroke or heart attack might not cause death but could leave a devastating impact upon her life. Now it was too late.

Sarah carefully weighs out the options. Her mother does not want to give up her "little farm," as she calls it, so Sarah brings her to live with her and her husband so her farm can be preserved.

It was the day that Sarah and her mother started their journey back to Sarah's home that Sarah had the profound realization that what she had always feared the most had happened: she and her mother had just changed places.