Picnics in the park

I kept a photo on the refrigerator door for a long, long time. The picture was of my eldest daughter and I at a picnic, taken at a moment neither of us was posing or prepared. We both had on sunglasses and were laughing together at something.

Here’s what I loved about that picture: you had to do a serious double take to tell which was me and which was my daughter. We looked so very much alike. Of course, I loved that!

I didn’t feel the same joy when I looked at my mom and wondered if people could still tell us apart.

It is a tough thing to watch our parents age and realize that this will one day be us. If we provide care to our parents, we are likely even more aware of the toll aging has taken on their bodies. We watch them experience cognitive decline and wonder, “Will I start to lose my mind any day now, too?”

Sometimes, watching the changes in our parents is enough to cause us to take a step back. It’s easier not to be faced with our inevitable aging than it is to look it right in the eye. We hold back our time; we hold back our energy. We feel a deep level of pain, fear and anxiety that keeps us from laughing, hugging, joking together.

And so, we are not present, when our simple presence could make all the difference.

I recall those moments when I so proudly would look at the picture on my fridge and think, “We look just alike.”

My daughter may have looked at the same picture, have the same thought, and feel horror and dismay.

It’s time to look past our obsession with youthfulness, and focus instead on relationships. It’s time to add more love – not less – to our lives.

Maybe we can close our eyes to the ravages of age. Maybe we can learn to open our eyes to the inner beauty of our elders – to the 25 year old young man with his new car; the young mother with her new baby.

Their hopes and dreams were fresh and alive then. Inside, some of those hopes and dreams still burn on, just waiting for us to say, “Hey mom, do you want to go for a drive to the park and have a picnic with me?”

Respite for family caregivers

“It’s so incredibly isolating,” my friend Melanie said recently about the time she was caring for her mother. “Even though we had great hospice nurses, there was often time when I couldn’t talk to anyone about my experience.”

Melanie helped her dad care for her mother, dying of cancer, through the end of her life in her own home. I remember talking to her one day about her drive time from her home to her parents, and how she had spent the entire drive home that week (over an hour each way) composing her mother’s obituary. Difficult, but so very important to Melanie to write the final chapter – the summary, really – of her mother’s life.

Like so many family caregivers, Melanie balanced her children – one at college and one still living at home – her family tasks and helping her parents. She talks of feeling too tired to even carry on a conversation after spending a day or two immersed in her mother’s care.

Melanie is a bright, well-educated woman who comes from a family with good financial and emotional support. For her, caregiving was isolating, exhausting, emotionally draining. What must the person with family, financial or emotional stresses in addition to the caregiving experience?

Another friend, Mary Ann, runs a local agency that offers family caregivers relief through a program called “Respite.”

The program, run by our local county and funded through state dollars, doesn’t ask how much money you make. It is available to family caregivers at any economic level. It provides someone to stay with your loved one while you take a break. It even pays for a massage, if that is what relieves your stress best.

“We all have a breaking point,” says Mary Ann. “Anything we can do to help someone avoid that breaking point is extremely valuable to the caregiver and to the person receiving care.”

Mary Ann knows. She cared for her grandmother with dementia; now she cares for her mother who has advanced memory loss. Even though her mother lives in a small care home, Mary Ann is involved in the day-to-day care. Ask her about her mother on any day of the week, and she’ll choke up as she shares – just a little – the pain of watching “mama” slip away.

And so Mary Ann encourages all family caregivers to get relief any way they can. She actively looks for ways to encourage, support, train and relieve the most exhausted caregivers, before they simply say, “No more.”

It is isolating, exhausting and draining, as Melanie points out.

But there is help. There is hope.

In the end, there is joy.