Jane Gross, The New Old Age in the New York Times
Sent a comment (don’t know if they’ll approve it) to Gross’s most recent writing “Learning to be good enough”
How do we discuss the frail elderly? How do we handle our own fear as we see ourselves as our parents, twenty, thirty, forty years from now? The frail elderly mirror our own mortality. Color our sense of self. Momma needs pharmaceuticals to handle her fears because I can’t be there to hold her hand at 2 a.m. when she’s afraid of the dark. So how do we, the caregivers of the frail elderly, cope with our own fears at 2 a.m.? What is this cycle going to be called, twenty years on? Frail Elderly Continual Care Stress Syndrome? Watching the Progression of Age Stress Syndrome?
My NYT comment:
Seven years with Mom in our house. Twenty years since Daddy died. The term “caregiver’s stress” does not begin to encompass the physical and emotional toll extracted — as our frail elderly begin to crumble before our eyes. My parents were my best friends. I told Daddy that we’d take care of Mom for him when he died.
When care evolves into a 24/7 lifestyle, I don’t think any of us are fully aware of the personal changes wrought by stress, fatigue, and the sense of failure as one watches their beloved fail. My soul aches for my mother. My body has begun to fail me as the ravages of continual stress begin to eat away at my physical self. Osteoarthritis, connective tissue disease, fibromyalgia, depression, asthma … the end result of over twenty years of loving someone while watching them die? It’s more than “caregiver’s stress” isn’t it?
Now my 91-year-old Mom is in a care facility. She’s on Ativan, Lexapro, and more to help her (and us) cope with the anxiety of a new place, different faces, rapidly advancing dementia and incontinence. She’s not here with me, I can’t hold her hand at 2 a.m. when she’s afraid of the dark but I can feel the pain, the physical shredding of my soul as I commit her to someone else’s care and let her go before she is really, truly gone.
