ELLEN, journalist and anti-athlete: When your life is complicated with ill family members or little children or low finances, vacation can mean staying home or spending time with people who need you.

How do you maintain a fitness regime or even just take good care of yourself in this situation? Please hit Add Your Own and weigh in.

Heather’s and Barbara’s great tips become ever more relevant when you are caring long-distance for an ill relative or if the economy has scuttled your holiday plans.

I tell you with some embarrassment that I have not had a true vacation in two years. This runs counter to good sense and flies in the face of all the advice from all the magazine articles and books and career advice you can find anywhere.

For two years, my father has been in the process of dying. He called me at work in 2001 and announced that he was not afraid to die and that he had about six months to live. This began a frenzied long-distance relationship between me and my dad, who lived in Milwaukee.

Most of my vacation travel from that phone call until he passed on in April had to do with helping him die. He wanted to go to Florida one last time, and my daughters and I went for 10 days to care for him and entertain him. He had various hospitalizations, and my five siblings and I took turns with Dad’s Last Christmas Duty and Dad’s Last Thanksgiving Duty.

He had a very serious surgery that required a stay in a skilled nursing facility, which is a euphemism for a wing of a nursing home. He hated that, and he called a cab to go home with several draining tubes sticking out of his belly, creating another reason to take some “vacation time” in my hometown.

At his house, I would cook, clean and make sure he was comfortable and that his socks were washed and his bathroom clean. My siblings were doing the same on a rotation because Dad kept firing the nurses and the helpers that we hired. He wanted to be independent at home.

My sister, Peg, who lives in Cleveland, did a much better job than me about taking care of her fitness needs while on her rotations. She lined up a club in Milwaukee and worked out. We also would find her walking aimlessly in the neighborhood when things were really tough. We laughed about this later. But she had the good instinct to keep moving. I wish I had followed her lead more. I don’t feel deprived that I haven’t had what most people call a vacation during this time. I am privileged to have been able to help my dad die comfortably in his house, the way he wanted it.

One smart thing I did do in the past year was take a no-hassle vacation: I just stayed home.

Posted June 04, 2003 01:32 AM