Seniorcare & Aging Parents Care
How do you define seniorcare? We think it encompasses all phases of senior care issues. It's about all senior medical care, senior personal care, and more; and it is complicated at best.
One of the hardest adjustments is eating and preparing your meals alone. Easy enough to fix, right? Wrong. Day to day events and tasks seem to last weeks, and the transition of going from comparing, bantering, negotiating, and agreeing to disagree that seemed so unimportant, is missed and held in awe in comparison to the silence of the room, the noise of the television, or the echoing of the noise of “nothing there”. How do you fix that with senior care assistance?
One senior put it this way: “When you are asked, are you okay? What can I say but yes. It’s not like I had a choice of this life or the one just past. If I had a vote, I’d naturally vote for the past one to never end. Everything in my world is still the same, the sun and moon still rises and sets, the weather is the same, my surroundings are the same – just empty even though it is full of friends, family, and supporters. I can’t break the emptiness inside my heart, though I know I must. One foot in front of the other, they say. Baby steps. It will get better. Will it? Do I care one way or the other now? How will I ever care again about anything?”
I believe one does not necessarily die of a broken heart, per se; but I am very sure that one CAN die from loneliness! I also believe that if you are taking on the roll with seniorcare, aging parents care, or senior care issues with anyone; you must commit yourself 100% to the quest to rid the person of as much loneliness as is within your power in order to help them survive. This could be the single most important factor in senior living care. It truly is a matter of life or death!
As a caregiver, a family member, or a good friend; how does one help another to overcome the loneliness and emptiness from the loss of a spouse, dear friend, family member, or anyone they were particularly close to? The quick answer is to be there for them. That’s very easy to say. Quite another to do.
But one has to remember that before this event occurred, you had a life, too. And that life was busy and filled with things that are important to you, things you need to accomplish daily, and things you just don’t want to give up. It’s important to be there for someone in need; but it is equally important not to become the replacement part of of loneliness and emptiness. This creates caregiver stress, also.
The most difficult part of caregiving and senior care assistance is that you can’t be there 24-7 unless you change everything in your own life that was or is. And even if you could, and even if you are willing to do that, you still cannot replace the person who is being missed 100%. Your senior care will be different in some way, your feelings will be different in some way, and the feelings toward you as a senior care advocate will also be different.
So even if you are willing to make the sacrifice of your “self”, it still may not be enough; and that can sometimes leave you with a feeling of being unappreciated and inadequate in seniorcare. It can cause harboring resentments on both sides. This, too, creates a great deal of caregiver stress while initiating feelings of inadequate seniorcare.
Sometimes you can feel so torn and indecisive in your choice of caregiving and senior living care. Do you give more of yourself and create a crutch for the person cared for, making them totally dependent upon you? Do you give less and walk away with horrible guilt that you aren’t doing enough, knowing there is so much more you could do, especially with aging parents care? Do you throw yourself into it so deeply in caring for your loved one that you lose a big part of yourself only to find years later you would not have made that decision if you could have a “do-over”.
Do you throw yourself in so much that YOU become attached and dependent upon that persons care, that when they pass YOU are left the empty, lonely soul that gave up everything else important in their lives for the care you gave them, and now you have nothing but the memories that could have been had you handled it differently? Seniorcare carries a huge responsibility and equal strong mindset.
It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it? How much is too much seniorcare? How little is too little? Being a fairly spiritual soul, I believe that God never gives you more than you can handle, and I also believe that when God closes one door, another one opens. I believe in fate, and I believe that I am in that spot in life exactly where I should be at this moment in the divine outline called “my life”. I guess the decisions will be dealt with differently for each of us. There is no pat answer and nothing is etched in stone when it comes to aging parents care or other senior care issues.
We all have different levels of need and of guilt; different levels of fear and pain; different levels of love and hate; and different levels of give and take. Somewhere in the middle of all this is the perfect solution so everyone has a happy outcome with seniorcare, and we can all live our lives as they were meant to be lived; In peace and harmony, happy and carefree, with love and respect for one another, and compassion and caring for one another.
It’s one thing to understand that life goes on after the loss of a loved one, but it is quite another thing to figure out how to make it happen, or to find the courage to even want to go on is quite another. If we work together, and act from our hearts when adopting seniorcare and handling aging parents care, I’m sure this is the course of action expected of us all in the long run. When heart, honesty, and love is involved, it can’t get too complicated if we don’t let it. We need only to step out of our own path sometimes to find the right footsteps to follow.
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