Caregiving

Christie was overwhelmed. Ever since her aging mother’s stroke six months ago, she had been her primary caregiver. Every day before work Christie would drive to her mother’s house to help her get out of bed and make her breakfast. On her lunch hour, Christie would dart across town to bring her mother lunch, eat with her, and help her around the house. And of course, on her way home each day Christie always stopped by to help her mother with dinner and get her ready for bed.

Being a caregiver for an aging or disabled loved one takes an incredible amount of strength. It takes strength to physically support them, to offer encouragement and positive perspective, to always be thinking ahead to their needs and strategizing better ways to live and thrive. But where does all that strength come from?

There are some decisions in life that are essentially weightless—what movie to see, what outfit to wear, where to go to dinner. And there are decisions that will echo through the decades. Choosing a caregiver for an older loved one can seem like it falls into the latter category: something with potentially life-altering consequences.

Jenn had been looking after her aging father, Alastor, ever since he suffered a stroke a year ago. When she quit her full-time job as a librarian to be his full-time caregiver, she never could have imagined just how challenging she would find it.

Gerrard used to love the rainy season in San Francisco. There was something about the cool air and the salty Bay Area rain that made him feel alive and energized. He never even really used to mind the flooding because, for him, it always seemed like a great chance to connect with his neighbors and lend a helping hand. Every year, when Gerrard was still able-bodied and strong, he and his wife would pick up sandbags for all the houses on his block in the back of his old VW van and help pile them up in front of everyone’s doorways and basement windows.

Diane looked forward to the holidays all year long. Every year, Diane would fly from her home in San Francisco to her daughter Helena’s home in Austin to spend the holidays with her beloved grandchildren.

When Ruth first started becoming afflicted with the slowly growing dusk of Alzheimer’s, the holidays became more difficult for her family. A time when we usually ward off the long nights with lights and love became a fraught mystery, filled with tension and a feeling of mute frustration.

In The Warmth of Other Suns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction book from 2010, the writer, Isabel Wilkerson, documents the Great Migration, the wave of African-Americans moving north away from Jim Crow and sharecropping into the uncertain and fraught freedoms of the industrial north in the 1910s and 1920s. In it, she tells a story that is both familiar and jarring: that of grandparents raising grandchildren.