Caring for an Aging Parent

Taking care of an elderly parent is a loss of innocence. Daily staring helplessly at suffering and death is like looking into the mirror of your future. (And you didn't want to know.)

The scream in your soul often betrays the smile on your face, and from time to time your hands shake, and you feel like crying. That is... you would cry...if you had the energy.

You are isolated, sadly realizing that every friend you ever had is gone. They are casualties of this war. You can't remember what it is to have a life, or to laugh from deep inside your belly, because nothing is that funny anymore.

Your days are filled with endless doctor appointments, pharmacy runs, urgent errands, and never-ending emergencies. Throw in the humiliation of bodily fluids making constant public appearances, and you swear under your breath that you'll never leave the house again without sunglasses. No one must ever see the pain that lies behind your eyes.

You know every crevice in the ER wall by heart, and you've counted all the ceiling and floor tiles. Your brain is full of vital information that every nurse needs to know, in order to fill out forms that are never glanced at by anyone.

Staying up all night is the only way to have any time to yourself, and the silence in those early morning hours is far more than golden. It keeps you breathing.

You stumble through the daylight hours, wearing a garment of fatigue and exhaustion, feeling like you never do anything quite right, though you try with all that is within, to win the approval of the one person that you can never please.

Others go about their lives, and then make not so subtle remarks about how they would do it different...and better. (And oh how you'd love to let them.) But they don't hang around long enough to ever lend a hand.

You wonder what life will be like when this is over, but then you feel so guilty for the thought, that you
are sure you've committed the unpardonable sin.

The bond that you have with your loved one is a two-edged sword. You do not know where they end, and you begin. You have been assimilated into their very body and soul. When they die, you are sure it will be because of something you did (or didn't) do.

Hours melt into days--days into weeks--weeks into months--and months into years. You are nobody's hero--just a prisoner of war.

But you are forever changed, and you cannot go back to the innocence that you once knew. The terror of aging is never far from your thoughts. You have seen the decline of the body, the loss of the mind, and the destruction of the spirit. And you, too, feel old and weary.

You know beyond any doubt that you will never do this to your children, and you pray that the myth of eternal youth will live long in their hearts. For you have been forever robbed of those beautiful fantasies.

It's not death that you fear; it's living. Living too long in a body that has betrayed you, seems far worse than leaving this earth behind.