Caregiving Is Stressful Under Any Circumstance

Catching All the Feelings

At some point, you will stop and take notice of your body. Maybe it’s seized up from stress. Maybe your ears turn red and hot when you’re anxious, as mine do, or you’re sleeping poorly, or you’re drinking too much bad coffee, or you haven’t exercised in weeks and your friends think you have disappeared and you don’t give two sh*ts about your job.

Stop. Sit down—outside, if you can. You need a moment. There’s a lot to make sense of during the caregiving journey, whether it is three days, three months, or three years.

In the best of times, you’ll be grateful you have the resources, education (formal or informal), and confidence to navigate this road. In the worst of times, you’ll melt down from the demands on your time, emotional energy, focus, and physical presence.

You may feel powerless in mitigating the chaos. You may feel anger and resentment toward others in your life—so much so that those relationships will be permanently changed.

You may gain weight, lose weight, age prematurely, or lose track of your own preventive health efforts.

You may spend an average of $7,000 of your personal money on caregiving for your person—frankly, that would be a steal.

Your relationships may have transformed—for better or worse—during this time and you don’t know how to celebrate that, repair it, or just move on the best you can.

No one walks the line between life and death—as the living and dying, or the person accompanying them on the line—without suffering a little.

How will you process all of this as you go along? Who will help you? How much latitude do your friends give you around feeling unhinged? How will you prevent emotional chaos from seeping into your relationship with your parent—good or challenging—during the last months, weeks, and days of their life?

Resentment. I have to talk about it because there’s almost no way around it. Maybe you’ll develop it for your parent: they expect too much, they didn’t think ahead, they’re in denial, they’re sabotaging your efforts to manage the situation, and they diminish or ignore your experience performing logistical gymnastics to help.

Maybe you’ll have resentment toward siblings or other relatives. They do little, or they do the easy stuff, paperwork, and nothing related to emotions or crisis management. Maybe it’s because you’re exceptionally skilled at these things, you’re so damn competent, but that won’t hold back the landslide of bitter resentment. People respect their own boundaries but not yours, it is infuriating. You will struggle to establish and enforce your own. The family won’t like it, no one likes it when someone in the family system tries to establish new norms.

Gratitude. If you’re lucky, one of your predominant emotions will be gratitude—at the beginning, middle, and end. Even if you’re raging against those who offer less, do less, and even minimize your efforts, you will feel it. It’s almost inconceivable that your person, someone you never imagined being vulnerable, is now reliant on you, a little child in a grown-up’s body, thrust into a position of doing right by them when you’ve done nothing whatsoever obvious to prepare for this moment. It may humble you to tears in a quiet moment. Come back to this feeling whenever you can.

Overwhelm. The sheer amount of work and the force of wildly ranging emotions during caregiving is enough to make the most centered person overwhelmed. There are seemingly constant appointments that involve driving and rescheduling your own life. There are calls from doctors, neighbors, and others involved with your parent’s affairs. Friends and family members expect updates from you because you’re the one who shows up consistently and they do not understand that in doing so they’re giving you another responsibility.

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Guilt. Guilt seems to have no end. It can feel impossible to keep everyone around you happy as a caregiver. It can feel like everyone has a stake in how you’re performing except perhaps you. Your loved one, family, boss, colleagues, and friends need something from you even when you have precious little to offer.

Self-preservation. It is tempting, and sometimes the right answer, to wipe almost everything and everyone off your calendar in service to what absolutely needs to get done. This is for your own peace of mind. That might mean laser focus on key aspects of your job, reviewing your auto-payments for your financial obligations (my car insurance expired while caregiving because I was so distracted, fortunately, I caught it before anything bad happened), hiring services when and where you can.

Humility. Caregiving is a humbling experience in that you are acutely reminded, from moment to moment, how much can change and how quickly. Waking up each morning with no pain, no chronic disease, and no terminal illness is not guaranteed; when that is the case, even while coordinating care for the opposite, it provides the necessary perspective. It can also serve as motivation for remaining in good health. Let it teach you.

Hindsight. Hindsight, ironically, is best considered in advance. It is helpful to know when deciding whether your future self will look back in gratitude or disappointment. Considering your future self will help you make decisions both for your loved one and yourself.

Wherever you are today, know that you are not alone.