Getting stuck in a cycle of overwhelming days and restless nights may be quite common in our driven culture, but that doesn’t mean this way of living is reasonable or negligible. You may be able to normalize this kind of lifestyle in your mind, but it will wear you down and create greater consequences over time.
Death, for many of us, is a sad and scary thought. Whether it’s losing a loved one or being faced with our own mortality, pain, suffering, and fear typically flood the forefront of our minds. After all, as human beings, we are biologically wired to be afraid of the unknown, and death is the greatest unknown of all.
Human beings are, by nature and habit, prone to entropy and pattern. It is hard for us to make changes unless changes are forced upon us. How many times do we wake up, look around, and realize we’ve been drinking the same coffee every day for five years, or been in the same job for a decade, or the same house for as long as we can remember?
I’ll never forget the day my grandpa fell in the shower and couldn’t get up. Thankfully, the cordless phone was close enough to reach, so he called my mom. Without saying a single word, she got in her car and drove an hour to my grandpa’s home to help him up. He was pretty injured from the fall, and my mom was devastated. That’s when she decided to help him move into a nursing home.
I knew something had to change when I fell asleep at the wheel and nearly got into an accident. I’d just completed a long and stressful evening of parent-teacher meetings, and I was driving to check up on my aging father.
We had a frequent guest, Jean, who had grown up in Chicago. She told us how when she and her children were looking into nursing homes, she used lessons learned from her very first apartment search. Her first apartment was right near the El tracks, and she said that every time a train went by, the water in the shower would stop. Of course, she didn’t know that before she moved in.
Betrayal is dependent on your expectation. If you don’t have high hopes for someone, you won’t feel betrayed. If you go into business with a man named “Jimmy Con-Artist,” you might not be surprised if you get swindled. But when you actually do have expectations of or trust in someone, like a professional caregiver, if they engage in cruel and harmful betrayal like financial abuse, it cuts deep.
“There are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” This earnest prediction by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter could feel constricting—or we could learn to take it in stride. We are all aging simultaneously, of course: Each day, we grow one day older together. But a disproportionate segment of our population is aging toward retirement and toward expanded needs for home care and other specialty resources. We know this to be true, and we can adapt and prepare ourselves as we are called to shift our roles, responsibilities, and generosity.
If you’re a caregiver of an aging adult who suffers from dementia, take a brief moment out of your current activities and mental flow to read the following statements. Read them one at a time, and be open to and aware of your reactions or responses—mental, physical, and emotional.
Where do we go when our mind betrays us and when the person that we have been our whole lives gets lost in the recesses of our brain? It’s a question with deep and often terrible philosophical, moral, and emotional implications, and the lack of an answer is one of the crueler parts of dementia and Alzheimer’s for a sufferer’s loved ones. But there is also a more tangible, though no-less-difficult, question: Where should they go?
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.
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