My uncle, Jim, loves to work with his hands. For most of his life, he’s been an avid model builder, painter, and multi-talented craftsmen. He could sit at the kitchen table all day long, building, painting, and creating without even stopping for lunch.
A new and unfamiliar caregiver situation has the potential to be uncomfortable on all sides: for the caregiver, for your aging loved one, and for you. But what if there was a really clear picture heading into it about everything the aging adult needs, as well as the things they love to spend their time doing? When a new caregiver steps in to relieve a regular caregiver, a respite care plan allows that initial adjustment phase to be shortened, so the new caregiver and the aging adult are able to start getting to know each other in enjoyable ways immediately.
After her father passed away, Sheila took it upon herself to care for her mother as best she could. Her mother, now 85, was still living independently, and Sheila had been paying most of the costs associated with her mother’s household. Sheila worked two jobs and rented out her basement just so that her mother could live comfortably in the home she’d been in for more than 30 years.
Caregivers have enormous amounts of responsibility when caring for an aging adult on a daily basis. But these responsibilities eventually boil down to two important issues: how to fill the day, and how to fill the day productively and meaningfully. Time, and the weight of it, balances with the responsibility to better the life of your charge. Whether you are a professional caregiver or a family member helping an older loved one, the issues are the same.
Since the death of his wife two years ago, George hadn’t been the same. He’d taken to sleeping most of the day, he withdrew from his cribbage club, and his appetite had all but disappeared.
She stopped for a second, interrupting her duties, which at the moment consisted of organizing a circle of musicians—older adults who had either once played an instrument or were taking it up for the first time after a long life of wondering if they could play. I asked her why she volunteered, why she took out hours out of her day to better the lives of strangers.
Balance is something so many of us take for granted until we lose it. I realized this for the first time a few years ago when I was grocery shopping with my grandmother. After years of picking her up every Sunday so that she could get her food for the week, we’d settled into a nice little routine. I’d follow her around with the grocery cart while she buzzed about, gathering her favorite rye bread, European butter, and Hungarian salami.
In the past several months, Helen had started to notice a difference in her aging mother. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it was as if Ira, who lived alone in her apartment at age 84, was finally starting to show the effects of aging more dramatically.
Getting older comes with a certain set of cultural expectations, rooted in our idealized sense of essential fairness. You work hard, perhaps you raise children, you have a decent old age, and you leave the world a little better than when you found it. Even just the price of human life—the struggles, heartbreaks, and quotidian day-to-day—seem to be justification for contentment toward the end.
“It seems like a long time since we’ve had something to argue about,” said Genevieve about her and her brother and sister. “Of course, we used to argue when we were kids. But now it’s like that all over again because we can’t seem to agree on much when it comes to decisions about Dad’s care. I can tell that we’re all caught up in emotions—a lot of different emotions.”
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