Tips for Managing Difficult Caregiver Emotions

Good article. Oh the emotions! Floods of them! I rarely felt like I was doing anything right when I was my mother’s caregiver. The guilt was always there. I grieved even before she passed on because so much of her had already died. I was hurt and angry because she no longer knew me. All of the emotions were amplified by just being so tired and feeling I couldn’t do it much longer but feeling even more guilty for that as well. And then when she was gone, the grief and guilt were almost unbearable at times.

I am sure my brother-in-law feels some of those same emotions as he cares for my sister. His has been different, very tiring no doubt, but the Parkinson’s has crippled my sister only physically until recently when the dementia began.

And I feel guilt for not being there more often, for not having longer phone conversations when she was able to. And I dread seeing in the condition she is in when I visit this weekend, dread saying goodbye, and of course I feel guilty about all of that.

I am thankful, though, that the dementia didn’t come until late in my sister’s Parkinson’s, and though there is the sundowning there was in my mother’s Alzheimer’s, this seems to be different, wildly swinging from moments of clarity to terrible confusion.

This Thanksgiving season as always it is good to think of what we have to be thankful for, to know we are blessed, in the midst of our brokenness and guilt.