Caring for Yourself While Caring for Your Aging Parents How to Help, How to Survive

Introduction You have to take care of yourself. If you don't take care of yourself, you won't be able to take care of another person. Dorothy Calvani, former staff nurse in the Geriatric Clinic of New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital, comforting the adult child of an Alzheimer's patient I am that adult child. At the time of this writing, I am fifty-eight years old. My mother, Rebecca, age ninety, has been widowed for close to three decades, almost from the age that I am now. She has been suffering from dementia for the last half dozen of those years. It's Alzheimer's disease, according to the many doctors that Mom and I have visited during this time. Of course, they add, only an autopsy can absolutely confirm the diagnosis, which has become irrelevant. More to the point is this overwhelming reality: my mother's in a bad way, and she's slowly getting worse. My mother-in-law, Hazel, now ninety-eight, suffers from a host of problems resulting from the deterioration of the machine that is her body. Simply, and sadly, the parts are wearing out. You could open a pharmacy with the medication and pills that this frail woman must take each day just to make it to the next morning. "Old age is hell," she tells me one day when we speak on the phone. She begins to cry. Both women were once capable, outgoing, and highly independent. Now each is widowed, ill, painfully lonely, and very much in need of attention and care. And I? I feel consumed by their situation. But most of all, I feel guilty. Guilty because whatever I do for "the mothers" (as I've come to refer to them in conversations with my own grown sons), I know it is not enough. Guilty because I permit both my sister and sister-in-law ("the saints") to do too much. Guilty because of my periodic outrage at a much-loved brother when I have felt he wasn't doing enough. Guilty because I'm healthy and able to go out to the movies and enjoy dinner with friends when my mother sits alone, at night, in her home. Guilty because I've come to view visits to my mother and mother-in-law as an obligation. (At the same time, I worry that my sons will feel similarly one day about visiting me.) I also find myself feeling angry. I feel anger when my mother, who was always neat and well-groomed, insists on wearing the same soiled red woolen jacket day in and day out. I feel anger when I find myself pressed to respond, once again, to a question that Mom has asked six times within a period of three minutes. (First I feel impatience, then annoyance, then a rising anger. I feel badgered.) I feel anger when I'm forced to shout because my mother refuses to wear the hearing aids we had obtained after she andBerman, Claire is the author of 'Caring for Yourself While Caring for Your Aging Parents How to Help, How to Survive', published 2005 under ISBN 9780805079753 and ISBN 0805079750.