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For the past few years, a friend I’ll call Beth has been juggling a demanding career with dual caregiving duties for a severely disabled child and a difficult, demanding widowed father in decline with heart failure and a host of other health issues. A year ago, completely exhausted, she placed her father in a group care home, a financial strain on her since he had no savings or long-term care insurance. With 24-hour care, he rallied a bit and looked poised to live long past his doctor’s predictions. Beth was, at once, relieved and despairing.
“I don’t think he’ll ever die,” she texted me one day. “I think he’s a vampire! Send me a stake and a silver crucifix! Truly. He has spent a lifetime letting me down and yet demanding so much from me. His care is breaking my budget. What if he lives for years and years? I feel horrible wishing he would die, but I can’t do this forever. And his quality of life is just miserable. It’s hard to see him suffering. It’s hard to think of him dying. It’s also hard to think of him not dying sometime soon. I’m both angry and sad and on the brink of tears all the time.”
When Beth's father finally died this week, she was surprised at the depth of her sadness, the surge of love she felt for him, and some lingering shame over having wished so fervently that he would die.
Beth has a lot of company among middle-aged children of elderly parents. We've watched our parents age, not always gracefully. We've seen final illnesses, undignified aging, and long, lingering goodbyes. And in the midst of this, there may be moments of wishing it would all be over—and then feeling horrified that we could think such a thing.
Losing a parent is a profound, life-changing event. And, for many of us, there is a long goodbye—the devastation of dementia, the long and painful road of cancer, the dwindling away of emphysema or COPD or heart failure. In these cases, you lose a parent over time, in heartbreaking increments—and sometimes you wish—for their sake and yours—that it were over.
If you've found yourself in this situation, it doesn't mean you're a bad son or daughter. You may have times when you feel blessed to be able to give back to your parent, to care for the person who once cared for you. But there may be times—when you see him or her suffering, when the indignities of infirmity are suddenly overwhelming, when the stress of balancing your life with these new responsibilities may make you wonder, "How long is this going to go on?"
Mixed feelings are normal.
You love your parent but hate the dying process.
You are grieved by the prospect of losing your parent—and appalled at the prolonged ordeal.
You are distraught watching the suffering of someone you love so much—and, at the same time, dread letting go and losing him or her.
You suffer through a multitude of losses when a parent descends into dementia, losing the parent and person you've always known and caring for the sometimes difficult stranger he or she has become.
Or you may find yourself taking care of a parent who has given you a lifetime of pain, and you're finding resentment and anger adding to the challenge of your new responsibilities.
Whatever your circumstances, there may be moments when you wonder, "How much longer?" or, "Sometimes I wish he (or she) would die," and feel instant remorse; it's important to remember that you are not alone, that such feelings are common in these stressful and sad situations—and that no one else can read your mind.
It's important to admit your full range of feelings to yourself, to forgive yourself, to accept yourself as is. Caregivers groups—sometimes offered through churches or through community services—can help. Or you might seek therapy in order to deal with your tumultuous feelings.
Therapy may be especially important if there is a darker reason for wishing a parent dead: the pain of continuing to deal with a parent who always was and continues to be verbally and emotionally abusive, controlling, or relentlessly critical.
In that case, it's best to seek counseling to work out your own feelings about your parent and endeavor to change the dynamic while you still can, while the parent is still living. Once a parent is gone, the hope that the relationship can change for the better dies with them. Perhaps changing the dynamics of your relationship will never be possible. But you can work through and resolve some of your own feelings so that you can feel more at peace with yourself and your parent at the end of his or her life.
Letting bitterness and anger linger unresolved through a parent's last years and death can erode the soul and lead to continuing unhappiness long after the parent is gone.
When our parents are in decline, there is so much that comes up as the past, present, and future converge. We mourn the loss of their youth and vitality, even as we feel our own beginning to wane. We may feel a mixture of fear and tenderness as our roles begin to reverse, and we become the caregivers of those who took such loving care of us—or not—all those years ago. And, in their decline, we catch a glimpse of our own future—and feel the temptation to flinch and look away.
But perhaps we can best cope with a parent's decline by admitting our pain and frustration to ourselves and then accepting our ailing parent on his or her own terms, sharing the moment, and entering their reality with a loving and generous heart.
It can be a challenge.
It isn't always possible.
But when we can manage, even briefly, to be fully present with an ailing parent, it can mean lovely moments shared in the midst of sadness and decline.
Alzheimer's slowly claimed my friend Tim's beloved mother some years before she took her last breath. The tender, sweet woman with the voice of an angel seemed a distant memory while still living. But there were moments when their hearts met with warm memories of the past and joy in the present. Tim especially cherishes the memory of the time when he visited his mother at her assisted living facility and found her beaming with pride and cradling imaginary twin babies in her arms, to the consternation of staff who were trying to get her to eat lunch. She frowned when one told her that there were no babies.
Tim smiled gently at his mother, imagining a time when she had held him and his twin brother, Tom, so tenderly. And he said, "Those are such beautiful babies. You must be so proud. I'm so happy for you. Why don't we make a special bed in that bureau drawer over there for them so that you can get some rest and eat lunch? You need to keep up your strength to take care of those beautiful babies."
She passed the imaginary babies to him, and he pulled out the drawer, softly smoothing the linens in there so the babies would be comfortable.
Then he turned to his mother, took her hand, and they looked at each other with a love that transcended her years of infirmity.
Love can survive through terrible times. My friend Jeanie, an only child, looked after her widowed father for some pain-wracked years as he morphed into a person she barely knew.
“The last years before my dad died, he was in pain and so unhappy," she told me. "I was sad for what he had become—an angry, distressed man. The dad I had loved died years before. When he actually passed, I felt sadness mixed with relief. When my dad died, he gave me back my life—and that is such a gift.”
