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.”
There’s a fairly new idea in medicine known as epigenetics. Roughly, it is the idea that the environment—broadly described as everything that happens to you—can influence your genetics, leaving you more or less prone to disease or sickness.
When my cousin and her family of four small children got caught in the 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Houston, they weren’t rescued from their flooded home by official rescue personnel; they waited in the attic until a friend came with a boat to take them to safety. Sometimes, the quickest, most reliable assistance comes from our friends and community connections—especially during disasters when there are a lot of people in need of help.
Institute on Aging (IOA) CONNECT is your direct line to us and the starting point for help with your concerns about the needs of older adults and adults with disabilities. IOA CONNECT links you with our services, as well as community services available. Reach out to connect with us.
Phone: (415) 750 – 4111 | Fax: (415) 750 – 5338
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