A Caregiver’s Challenge

I am blessed to be well loved and to have a plethora of people to love in return. Loving people comes with great rewards. It also comes with heartache. Especially as we get older.

I am caught in the “sandwich generation”, at the age where we have kids still at home, but aging parents to also care for. While I did not have to care for either of my parents before they passed years ago, I find myself caring for a dear, elderly friend.

I met Tom seven years ago when I first moved to Magnolia’s End. He and his wife, Dot, adopted me as their own daughter and treated me 1000 times better than my own parents did.

Tom was one of the most intelligent men that I know. He was a great writer, and I’ve even published books for him. He and Dot were instrumental spiritual teachers to me, both having been heavily involved in the hippie movement of the 1960s. They taught me magic, mysticism, Cherokee folk ways and pathworking, secrets of the Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls, Huna, and what parental love feels like. They know how to love.

Tom developed dementia two years ago and it has slowly begun to steal the man who is like a father from me. Dot took care of him until she crossed the River Styx last November. Since then, Lethe has taken a stronghold on Tom’s mind, draining the former knowledge from him. It breaks my heart to see this once brilliant man slowly become incapacitated as he drinks from the River of Forgetfulness. He knows he is losing his faculties. He knows he has to rely on others in a way that is humbling for a former sheriff to have to do.

I am honored that he trusts me enough to help him. “You are my daughter,” he tells me. “Children don’t have to be born from your loins. They can be born from your heart, too.” I cry when he says that. 

Along with his son, we have managed to help him remain independent for the time being. But he needs help; taking his medicine, paying his bills, keeping things organized, staying in the present, loving without judgment.

This is where a caregiver’s challenge comes in, continuing to love without judgment. It is hard on some days. When his aphasia is stealing his words and he cannot put a sentence together, I am compassionately patient and wait for him to get his thoughts out.

Sometimes, I am not feeling compassionately patient. Or patient at all. I just want him to hurry up and get it out, already. I am mindful of my feelings and careful not to let them show. It is frustrating enough for him without me making it worse with impatience.

I am compassionately patient when he tells the same story of his young adulthood over again for the nth time. It is his memory, one he can readily access and articulate. That I have heard it before doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am kind as I hear it now.

I am compassionately patient when he forgets where he puts things and blames it on a thief, only for it “to come back” later. I do not tell him there is no thief. There is no returning of the items because they were never gone. Saying something does no one any good and only agitates everyone.

It is compassionate patience and mindful intent that gets Tom and his son and I through our days. Our intention is to be as loving as greatly to a man who greatly loved us.