Stresses of seniors caring for elderly parents

When finally mom or dad goes to a nursing home, adult children begin a whole new life journey, with new responsibilities, fears and sadness all welling up at the same time.
People who have not been down this path won’t understand. Friends and even spouses will react differently, even indifferently, or angrily.

Siblings especially will react in unexpected ways.

According to Francine Russo, author of They’re Your Parents, Too! How Siblings Can Survive Their Parents’ Aging, siblings rarely share parent care equally. Just because one sibling takes primary responsibility, it doesn’t let the others off the hook. “It will haunt you later,” Russo writes.

Meanwhile, the other siblings will often criticize the main caregiver at a time when the main caregiver needs emotional support and sometimes needs a break.

On the other hand, the main caregiver can’t assume the other siblings know what is needed.

After the long months, or even years of the pain of supporting a parent in a nursing home, with death often comes bonding. Graham Norton is a wellbeing columnist for the UK Telegraph. He writes movingly about watching his father destroyed by Parkinsons, including the guilt and pain those years caused.

But after the worst is over, Norton writes, there is light.

“In dying, my father brought my mother, sister and myself closer that we had ever been,” Norton writes. “The other strange, unclaimed treasure that can come with the loss of a parent, is that their whole person is suddenly revealed to you. I lost a father, but the friends, neighbors and relations that called to our house described someone else — a work colleague, a friend, a drinking buddy.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I got to know my father better in the weeks following his death than I ever did or could have done when he was alive.”