“I had the feeling that all wasn’t well with my father,” Claire Milne recalled.
It was Christmastime in 2003, and Milne had flown from her London home to visit her 82-year-old father in Maryland. Milne noticed that her dad struggled to stay upright as he walked — early signs of a mysterious neurological condition.
Over the next four years, Milne, 56, would travel across the Atlantic every few months to watch over him, standing by during hospital stays, offering support as well to her ailing stepmother.
She helped arrange electronic payment of their bills. She helped them think through the pros and cons of moving into an apartment. She made sure her siblings were up to date on the latest health news.
“I don’t think of it as a duty,” Milne, a telecommunications consultant, explained shortly before her father died last month. “I think of it as what I want to do.”
My wife and I have been involved in extensive elder-care for our elderly relatives in one way or another since the mid-1990s.
First it was her mother who passed at age 95, then my mother who just celebrated her 99th birthday. In addition, we have provided support to her aunt who passed at age 95 and an elderly cousin suffering from life-long cerebral palsy. She passed in her late 70s at a Lutheran nursing home where she had been ‘institutionalized’ for many years.
None of this has been easy. But these efforts, have given us much more than in return than we have given to those who needed our care.
Elder-care has been a real blessing. It has stimulated and cultivated within both of us a deep sense of spiritual growth. A ‘sense of growth’ that is not introverted and self-serving, but rather one that is extroverted, one that gives one a sense of ‘community’ with the ones we have been priveleged to care for.
In addition, each Sunday, in our small community, my wife and I serve as lay eucharistic ministers at a local elder-care residence. This has increased the size of our family and again has ‘extroverted’ rather than ‘introverted’ our ‘sense’ of spirituality and our feeling of ‘communion’ with the Body of Christ. That is, all of us, the elder-residence residents and my wife and myself, together, as a group, celebrate a spiritually filling euharistic celebration and a sense of Christian brotherhood/sisterhood.
Elder-care can be fulfilling, try it, you probably like it.
To paraphrase an old song, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”
[b]Elder-care can be fulfilling, try it, you probably like it.[/b] I couldn’t agree more. Both my parents passed before I was 30 and being able to care for my F-I-L who passed a few years ago and my M-I-L who will probably outlive both of us, filled a hole in my heart. By proxy I was able to care for my parents in a more normal passage of life kind of way. Getting the church youth involved in elder-care is a joy. It is wonderful how loving and caring they can be…so willing to do chores that they would grumble and groan over if asked to do them at home. I believe it helps them to grow into the responsibility of children to their parents as they age.
I don’t know what the majority of you American do with yours oldies, but when I came to live in UK, about 8 years ago(from Brazil) left me shocked, they don’t give a dam to their oldies. They put them in home cares(here the HM Gov pays if you don’t have money for to keep them) and forget them. Or worse, they let them to live alone, and visit them some time(once a year) they are looked after by social cares that visit them some times(they do the shopping and cleaning), My mather in law is 73 and she lives with me, people think that this is some thing strange but this is commum in romance societies, even those more germanized like France. I know the Germanic people are very cold spatially the Anglo-Saxons and they very small families, and the word family doesn’t mean so much to them. My wife’s great grand-mother passed away with 94 years old alone in her flat after a fall. No one wanted to look after her. I hope you American look better after your oldies them your British cousins.
[blockquote] I hope you American look better after your oldies them your British cousins. [/blockquote]
Amen, Paulo UK, Amen!
#3 Paulo, generalizations are very dangerous when it comes to talking about any grouping anywhere in the world. The vast majority of folks I grew up with in Britain have struggled to give their elderly parents good golden years, and yes, many of them did have their parents living with them as you do. The same is true of friends and those among whom I ministered in the USA for more than thirty years.
I can relate to the woman who is the focus of this story. For a decade I never got a proper vacation because I used all my vacation time from my ministry in the USA to go to Britain several times a year to make sure that my brother, who my elderly parents lived with, got a chance to get away and refresh himself. I know other transatlantic people who have done similar things. I am profoundly grateful that even though it stretched us to the very limits financially and emotionally, we were able to do this because I loved my parents and what better way to honor them as the Lord bids me?
While God’s call has now brought me back to Britain, a side benefit of this is that we are quite close to my wife’s 89 year old mother. She is very independent, but we are now in a position to make sure that as she declines we are available to her. She, of course, is over the moon with delight.
Having worked and lived on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as having traveled and ministered in several dozen other countries, I would say that there is roughly the same mixture of carers and non-carers for the elderly in the western and ‘developed’ economies I have visited.
There is a basic principle in logic that needs to be remembered when making statements of any kind: that it is inappropriate to argue from the particular to the general. Paulo’s comment that the British warehouse their elderly and forget them is just such a statement.
When my father had Alzheimer’s, I spent as much time with them as possible and sometimes cared for him to give Mother a break. This was not a substantial sacrifice on my part, although it wasn’t pleasant, either. The point is that I don’t regret one moment of it, even the hard moments. Had he not died from his last illness, I think it would have been time for a nursing home, and I hope we would have had the grace to spend enough time with him even in that setting. Two of his brothers are now in nursing homes: one became violent (due to the Altzheimer’s, not his own character at all) and the other kept wandering off, walking miles through the countryside. Sometimes it’s a necessity.
I’ve never heard anyone regret the time they gave their parents in the last years, although I have heard regrets for not giving enough time.
I was blessed with freedom by my teammates and my mission agency and my sending church that when my mom needed care, I was able to take an extended leave of absence from the mission field to come and be with her. Those 2 1/2 years were HARD on one level (especially the shock of going from the busyness of my work as the project director for our NGO, and also my ministry in teaching and discipling new believers to being a care giver in an area where I knew virtually no one. My mom had just moved from NJ to FL when her emphysema became acute). Yet I’m so thankful for that time with her, it was excellent for our relationship, and the Lord also used it to teach me patience and gentleness on many new levels.
Mom died almost 7 years ago, and I still miss her greatly, but the ache is eased by the fact that we had so much good time together in that final 2 years. Her death has been easier to bear in many ways because I was with her. I wasn’t with my father when he died in 1992, my first year on the mission field, and to this day, I deeply regret that and am still bearing the consequences. My dad’s family hasn’t forgiven me and several of my cousins, etc. refuse to speak to or have anything to do with me. That’s been terribly hard…
Caregiving is not easy. That switch from being child to having responsibility for one’s parent is terribly hard. But I can testify to the abundance of the Lord’s grace and that it was the right decision for me to throw aside my ministry overseas to be with my mom. My heart goes out to all who face similar choices as they face a long-distance relationship with (a) parent(s) who needs care. I was fortunate in having my mother’s need be clear and sudden, and also having a pretty high degree of freedom and flexibility in my work and ministry. Not all who face similar choices are so blessed.
[i]For a decade I never got a proper vacation because I used all my vacation time from my ministry in the USA to go to Britain several times a year to make sure that my brother, who my elderly parents lived with, got a chance to get away and refresh himself.[/i] Such a good point made here. Sometimes there is a sibling who is the primary care giver for various reasons. Taking care of them too, as RichardKew did, is also an important part of elder care.
[i]That switch from being child to having responsibility for one’s parent is terribly hard. [/i] A parent’s primary responsibility is to raise their children to be adults. Being an adult is understanding life’s phases and when you are at your strongest is the time when you take care of the weakest. I think this is best taught by example. You learn to raise your babies from the way your parents raised you. You learn to care for the elderly by observing they way your parents cared for their own.
I’m not trying to come down on the writer of this post. I’m just thinking out loud that we could all do more to raise our children to see the ebb and flow of life and how mature people respond to that.