“What has been is what will be, and what has been
done is what will be done; there is nothing new under
the sun.” Ecclesiastes: 1:9
Caring for aging parents is nothing new. Had we been
privy to a family discussion in Bedrock, we might have
heard a middle-aged Pebbles and Bambam discussing what
was to be done with the widow Wilma who was found
wandering the streets at three a.m.—minus her leopard
skin.
I am one of the thirteen million baby boomers caring for
an aging parent. Although I’m not alone, the
particulars of my situation may be somewhat different.
I not only take care of my ninety-year-old mother but
also of my husband, who has been battling lung cancer
and prostate cancer for eight years. There are similar
problems in both kinds of caregiving: fatigue, burnout,
time management, haggling with insurance companies,
communicating with medical personnel, and making life
and death decisions. But if you ask me which is more
difficult, I would say taking care of my mother exacts
the more emotional toll.
Both kinds of caregiving have required me to accept the
mortality of a loved one, and subsequently my own
mortality. Having been told my husband’s cancer is
incurable, I teeter between hope and despair. There is
always the hope he will get better, seesawing with the
fear that he won’t. While his death might be inevitable,
it is not imminent.
With my mother there is no seesawing, just a downward
slide. Death is both inevitable and imminent. I can hope
for a little more time with her, but I know the aging
process will culminate in death—most likely in the near
future. That prospect is sad but not tragic. We expect
our parents to die before we do.
Parents are a buffer between us and death. As long as we
have a living parent, it seems that we are protected
from the grim reaper. Watching my mother age is
frightening because I see what lies ahead for me. All of
the vitamins, spas, plastic surgery, and good clean
living won’t stop the inevitable. If I’m lucky, I, too,
will grow old and feeble. My children will, as I do now,
and as Pebbles and BamBam did before me, struggle with
taking care of their mother. Will they be torn between
their personal needs and mine? Already my daughters joke
that they need to start looking for a nursing home that
will meet my needs: good feng shui, gourmet health food,
no wake up calls before eight a.m., and a van that
provides scheduled trips to the Galleria. Unlike my
mother, I am high maintenance.
No doubt, my adult children will also be plagued by the
notion they can never do enough. How is it possible to
repay all that a mother does for her children? Mothers
put their children first, as they should. Children put
their own children first, as they should. When the
mother becomes the child, it is hard to make the shift.
The role reversal is difficult to absorb. We expect our
infants to be helpless; we even enjoy their dependence
on us. I never objected to changing baby diapers but
adult diapers are another story. I loved to watch my
baby, snoring gently, mouth open, drooling as she slept.
My mother—not so much. Obstinacy in a three-year-old is
tolerable, but an unreasonable adult is infuriating. I
didn’t expect my two-year-old to understand everything I
told her, but I’m not used to having to explain things
to my very-intelligent mother whose thought processes
continue to slow down. I want to shake her and say,
“Stop it! You’re scaring me. I just told you that five
minutes ago.” If I could voice my inexpressible fear, I
would say, “Please don’t get old. Please be the same
mother I’ve always known. Don’t leave me.”
Cancer caregiving is stressful, but when my husband was
diagnosed, I was at a place in life where I could drop
everything and devote myself to taking care of him.
Compared to some, I’ve had it easy—no job to hold down,
no children at home, good insurance, and plenty of
emotional support. I gladly gave up some of my
activities because I wanted to be with him. I did
nothing from a sense of duty and I had no reason to feel
guilty.
With my mother I am tormented by guilt—which is
surprising because she has never used guilt to
manipulate me. Yet, I feel guilty when I am short with
her, guilty when I don’t want to stay with her, and
guilty because I’d rather be doing a whole bunch of
other things. I feel like the very-bad-daughter of the
very-good-mother. Guilt in the mother-daughter
relationship is inevitable because if we’ve had a good
mother, we can never give her all that she deserves.
I am certain that when my mother dies, I will be full of
regret. For now, I do the best I can—reminding myself
frequently how lucky I am to have a mother to take care
of.
Cynthia Siegfried, a caregiver advocate, is author of
Cancer Journey: A Caregiver’s View from the Passenger
Seat and co-founder of f.a.i.t.H.—facing an illness
through Him, a support group for families facing
catastrophic diseases. For more information go to:
www.caregivercancerjourney.com
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