Comments on: Am I Being Patient Enough?

By: admin

admin — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:18:09 +0000

Nancy, Thank you for making these excellent points. You have certainly summed up caregiving. It is hard, it can sometimes be painful, but it's what we're called to do. I liked your comments so much, I wanted to share them with our Aging Parents Community. I wrote about these hot button caregiving issues in this morning's blog post, Am I a Good Caregiver <

By: Nancy Jones

Nancy Jones — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:01:36 +0000

I just finished a fourteen year vigil with my mother. Told at 79 that she would not last 6 weeks, she just passed away at the age of 93. The one thing you have to remember is that you will not get a “do-over” on this task. No matter how, in the day to day grind, you may become frustrated, discouraged, DO NOT HAVE TIME!!! and are not treated well by misbehaving parents who have actually become the children you have to discipline with “time outs” and such. I have seen many adult children check out, say, “My parent and I did not have a good relationship, so I don’t care what happens to her now.” This will not wash in a psychological future self evaluation. You know you have a responsibility to be the best child you can be, as they had a responsibility to be a good parent, whether they were or not.
It’s now rather odd that I don’t have the daily phone call to make. I sometimes found it helpful to be in heavy traffic, so when the topic got frustrating, or the complaints about the staff stealing her things got to be too much, I could always plead traffic and have to go. But I certainly do not regret those daily phone calls. My husband lost his dad last year, for a long time, he had called to talk every night, a true patience tester, because his dad was very hard of hearing. Now, he is very glad he took that extra and frustrating bit of time to communicate with someone who was passing through another time of life. I hope we have accumulated good karma and that someone else will be as patient and involved with us as we were with our parents. If nothing else, we set our children a good example of what we consider a requirement of life, to honor our parents.

By: Rob McInnes

Rob McInnes — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:46:21 +0000

My mother and my in-laws are in their 80′s and live 300 – 1500 miles away. My mother-in-law is in a nursing home, but the other 2 are still independent. I don’t have the daily work of caring for them like many seniors do. But I worry and try to make things easier for them at a distance. I phone my mother every 4-5 days or so to check in. She gives me the update about her doctors’ appointments and her friends and her days’ events. I find it difficult even to find the time sometimes to call her. I wish it was easier- easier to be more involved and easier to be more comfortable with the phone calls.