Posts filed under 'Caregiving'
By JimG for 3GenFamily Blog
Aging parents often say “I don’t want to burden my children”. But, the truth is that many sons and daughters will need to bear some burden if their parents are to maintain a dignified life as they weaken with age. For some families, the burden will be relatively light and manageable, especially with advanced planning.
For others, even for those gifted with foresight, the load will require appreciable changes in life, i.e., sacrifice. In modern-day America, we would like to think that the dramatic choice between caring sufficiently for our aging parents and pursuing our own most important goals and objectives in life can always be avoided. In my opinion, it is not always possible.
Many people in this situation make the noble choice and compromise their own family life, career development, financial security, leisure pursuits, and overall “quality of life” for their parents. In the end, they get to attend a funeral and are left with a lonely, empty feeling. They’ve probably not been giving their friends as much attention as in earlier times, and thus may not have as much support available once the end finally comes.
Wanted: Stories that Affirm Caregiving as Worthwhile
Hopefully, they know that they did the right thing, that they upheld the most basic notions of common decency and societal virtue. But American culture does not offer them much support and affirmation for that.
I can’t think of any movies or songs or stories that celebrate those who gave away something of themselves to repay their parents for the gift of life. The more prevalent assumption seems to be that such people should have gotten better financial advice or that they did what they did because of an unhealthy psychological dependency.
Instead, I suggest that we turn to the ancient Greeks for some advice, given their great interest in truth and wisdom. I’m not a trained Greek scholar, but I know of one story that might apply here. It is the tale of Cleobis and Biton, as narrated by Solon in the writings of Herodotus and centuries later by Plutarch.
In a nutshell, Cleobis and Biton were two young men who lived with their mother on a farm in Argos, probably a fairly well-off rural estate. Their mother was a patron in good standing at the Temple of Hera, where services and sacrifices were held in honor of the goddess Hera.
To maintain such good standing, it was important to attend the major ceremonies on a regular basis and to arrive punctually. On the day of a festival for the goddess, it was time to hitch the oxen up to the cart that would transport mother over the six miles of roadway that led to the Temple.
However, the oxen were somewhere in the lower forty still plowing. It was clear that mother wasn’t going to make it in time, and was going to lose some points with the high priest or priestess for showing up late (or not at all).
So Cleobis and Biton stepped up and decided that they would latch themselves up to the cart and pull their mom over the bumpy roads to Hera’s Temple. (So much for their pleasant evening sipping wine and watching the sun set from the back porch.)
After a hot and dusty trip, Cleobis and Biton got mom and cart up to the Temple gate in time for the torch procession or however they began a pagan temple service. In their exhaustion, the two sons decided to find a quiet spot somewhere in the Temple, and both soon fell asleep.
As the service progressed, mom invoked the goddess in honor of her two wonderful sons — that they die the happiest of men. Well, this IS an ancient Greek story, so you know there’s an ironic twist involved. And here it comes. After the service was over, mom went to find her two sons and discovered their lifeless bodies. They never woke up from their slumbers. A terrible tragedy.
Rich as Croesus
BUT, on finishing this story, Solon points out to King Croesus that despite the King’s great wealth and his fabulous success in life, he was NOT the happiest of men. The happiest of men were Cleobis and Biton (and also Tellus, another humble man who died honorably enough to be recalled by Solon). Their mother’s wish was granted.
Although their grimy, sweaty exhaustion followed by unforeseen death sounds anything but happy, the ancient Greeks did not measure ‘happiness’ simply by the internal sense of personal satisfaction and fulfillment. They used a more ethereal standard, appealing to the ideals of virtue.
According to the Greeks, Cleobis and Biton were heros and should be emulated (although their mother obviously should have pondered the maxim ‘be careful what you wish for’). They were not poor chumps who got a bad hand because of their own neurotic dependencies and lack of foresight (e.g., they should have thought to send a house servant out to call the oxen back in from the fields a few hours before the service).
The ancient Greeks could indeed be a bit over-dramatic in making their point. I’m not suggesting that a person should be willing to die in the service of dependent parents. In fact, it’s extremely important to take care of yourself while under the stress of parental support.
Honoring Your Parents
But the fact remains that the truest of true happiness doesn’t always SEEM very happy, in the modern sense. Taking care of a dependent parent, whether on the front line, or even in a support role, can be a drag. It DOES sometimes take away some of your own life opportunities and choices.
And there isn’t always a wide assortment of people around who want to support you during your months or years of trial. After you miss four or five New Year’s Eve parties, you may not be getting as many phone calls. Your situation is just not fashionable.
But if it was good enough for the people who gave us Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, perhaps it should be well considered by us moderns too. Just as America learned to ’support our troops’ after the disregard which they unjustly received during the Vietnam years, perhaps we also need to better support those on the front lines of parental caregiving.
Virtue is its own reward, as Herodotus and Plutarch implied. But public acknowledgment of such virtue is also a good thing, as the ancient Greeks also realized.
JimG offers his thoughts about the Greeks, true virtue and caring for parents in this special guest blog for 3GenFamily. You can read more about him and his writing at www.eternalstudent.com.
© 2008 JimG All Rights Reserved.
July 5th, 2008
By CK Wilde for 3GenFamily Blog.
I came across an old photo of my Mom the other day.
She is standing on the lush lawn in front of my sister’s home, her right arm folded primly across her body. Hanging from her arm is her trusty handbag. If you have every seen pictures of Queen Elizabeth II of the UK on an outing, you have seen the formal handbag pose.
Mom’s handbag was a treasure trove of necessities for the modern woman — and for my Dad. You see, whenever they went out of errands together, Mom carried the money, bankbooks, receipts, you name it, and Dad’s reading glasses. He never lost a pair when she was guarding them.
After she died, he resorted to carrying his glasses with case in his shirt pocket. That worked most of the time. He was fortunate that bank employees and medical receptionists would recognize his glass case on the counter or desk and help him remember to put them in his pocket before leaving.
A Service That Returns Your Glasses
You may already be aware that a quality pair of eyeglasses can cost $300 - $400. Even if you are not on a tight budget, losing your glasses can prevent you from going about your daily business. If you can’t drive without them, how do you get to the doctor for a replacement?
The perfect solution has finally arrived — Eyeglass Rescue!
You attach the tags to the glasses and register your contact information either online or by phone. That’s it!
When someone finds your glasses, she or he can call the toll free phone number for Eyeglass Rescue to report finding them. Eyeglass Rescue will help the finder return your glasses to you.
Eyeglass Rescue received its first patent in 2004. Since then, the company reports that it has over 25,000 subscribers and has returned more than 4,000 pairs of glasses to their owners.
And, good deeds get rewarded. Eyeglass Rescue sends the finder a thank-you package of merchandise.
You can order tags for your eyeglasses directly from Eyeglass Rescue’s secure order page on their web site (www.eyeglassrescue.com) or from Walgreens.com and CVS.com.
While you are at it, maybe you want to order a tag for your glasses. There are even special color tags for your child’s glasses. It’s a great solution for everyone in your family, including elderly parents.
© 2008 CK Wilde. All Rights Reserved. Please feel free to link to this post but you must have prior written permission to reproduce this post either whole or in part. Please use the comments to request permission.
July 1st, 2008
By CK Wilde for 3GenFamily Blog
Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
* * * * *
“Are you coming to bed, hon?” whispered my sleepy husband.
“In a minute . . . this is such a good book!” I said as I glanced up.
From the first paragraph, Carol O’Dell’s book, Mothering Mother, had me spellbound. I just could not put this book down.
Sleep is my most precious commodity. It is rare for me to stretch the time before I turn out the lights. Yet, this engrossing story made me willingly break my own rule.
Most resources about caregiving focus on cold, factual advice to the reader. While how-to books can be very helpful, they don’t deliver an insider view of the physical and emotional impact of caring for someone daily for an extended period of time.
Mothering Mother propels you into O’Dell’s non-stop whirl of caring for a parent with Parkinson’s disease while caring for teenage daughters with their own needs and trying to sustain her relationship with her husband. Oh, she is also working to keep her sanity.
Alzheimer’s, Too
Through twists and turns in all of their lives, I found myself laughing out loud at some of the crazy-making outbursts from O’Dell’s mother, Noveline. But, I wasn’t laughing at O’Dell or her mother. I was laughing because my Dad or another elder said something totally off the wall just like it.
Then, it hit me. At this point in the story, Noveline has symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in addition to Parkinson’s, but O’Dell doesn’t know what it is yet. I remember being baffled by things my Dad said. I remember my frustration with Dad’s paranoia and his unwarranted fears.
Dancing As Fast As She Can
Carol O’Dell is startlingly honest in describing her hectic life, her thoughts and her feelings - amused, angry, stressed, exasperated, determined, perplexed, overwhelmed and inspired by events as they occur. If you have never dealt on a daily basis with a baby’s dirty diapers or tried to lift a grown adult who has no strength, some of her descriptions may shock you.
Like most caregivers for aging parents, O’Dell didn’t take classes in geriatric nursing. She’s learning “on the job.” Insurance won’t cover nursing care in the home. Medicare only covers it for a short time after a hospitalization. Hospice help only arrives at the end, long after O’Dell has won the major battles.
Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir is an important book for caregivers and other family members to read. Certainly, Carol O’Dell’s experience is her own. Yet, the book describes common issues that anyone caring for a parent, or considering it, needs to think carefully about.
Thank you, Carol O’Dell, for sharing your innermost thoughts and feelings with us! This book rates five stars.
Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
© 2008 CK Wilde. All Rights Reserved. Please feel free to link to this post but you must have prior written permission to reproduce this post either whole or in part. Please use the comments to request permission.
June 19th, 2008
By CK Wilde for 3GenFamily Blog
http://www.pbs.org/caringforyourparents
I received an email from my cousin about the PBS documentary, Caring for Your Parents, a few days after it aired on April 2, 2008. He wanted to know if I was going to talk about it here. He thought it was a dynamite show.
I missed it the first time it aired. Fortunately, the entire show is available at the PBS website. So I was able to watch it today.
Wow!
The Caring for Your Parents website has divided the show into small sections. I was only going to sample a few sections to get a sense of what the show was about. That turned out to be nearly impossible. I had to watch the entire show.
The show’s producer, writer and director, Michael Kirk tread a fine line between respecting the private aspects of each of these five families from Rhode Island while having them describe the unvarnished truth of their lives as caregivers for their aging parents. We follow them over the course of a year. From well-to-do to working class, each family is coping with their parents evolving lives. Several of these families were dealing with parents with dementia.
It’s funny how we sometimes think our own situation is different or unique. I was struck by how eerily similar many of the conversations between adult child and parent and health care provider were to my conversations with my father.
Early in the show, one of the parents was being reminded by his doctor that he needed to give up driving a car because his memory has started to fail. The conversation was so similar to ones I had with my Dad that I was stunned!
The families and situations were varied but the major themes were the same as those I had encountered. Here are a few highlights:
1. Many of our parents believe in being self-sufficient. They will not mention problems they are having because they don’t want to be a burden. So, it is important to have conversations about finances and medical care and to continue having conversations as your parents’ health changes. Their choices and decisions and wishes need to be written down. It’s not one conversation–it’s many over time.
2. Your interactions with your adult siblings regarding your parents will mirror the interactions you had when you were younger. If your fought as kids, you will likely fight about your parents’ wellbeing. You can break out of the old pattern. You need to toss your expectations away about what your siblings ought to be doing. Inter-family anger is likely when one sibling does all the caregiving. It needs to be dealt with in a positive way.
3. The family members providing care often deal with highly technical medical information in order to provide a parent with informed care. It practically takes a Masters degree to deliver medication, understand what the issues are, speak for the patient when she/he can speak for themselves and make the excruciating decision on when to stop a treatment that isn’t working.
4. All of this work takes a huge toll on the caregiver whose health may be in jeopardy from the stress and self-denial. Of the five families, the caregivers who took time to take care of themselves fared significantly better than those that didn’t.
Director, Michael Kirk, tries to end on an upbeat note by talking about “Transformative Moments”. My own experience bears out that there are often funny, happy and special moments shared with your parents as you care for them. The more you focus on those moments of joy the easier it is to get through the difficult moments.
Caring for Your Parents forces us to confront the idyllic myth that we and our parents may have of their independently living out their days in happy retirement until their “time is up.” Our elders are living longer, often in poorer health. They need more and more of our help as time goes on.
This documentary is a real eye opener. Please do watch it.
It is available for viewing on the PBS website and the DVD is available for purchase.
Caring for Your Parents
© 2008 CK Wilde. All Rights Reserved. Please feel free to link to this post but you must have prior written permission to reproduce this post either whole or in part. Please use the comments to request permission.
May 4th, 2008
