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.
“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.”
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.
For the whole month of October, San Francisco’s City Hall will be washed in purple lights. Many people will wonder why. Our hope is that by the end of the month, everyone will know why and feel the resulting unity throughout the city and the nation.
We may not always be aware of it, but our way of relating to life is dependent on our way of relating to time. Breakfast comes before lunch and dinner, for example. If we haven’t already shopped for food in preparation, we know we’ll have to take care of that need before those meals. On a deeper level, our past experiences help to develop our personalities, and they provide a context for how we relate to people, places, and things around us—and how we relate to ourselves.
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