I read a blog entry today that reflected on a hazard of caregiving, becoming addicted to being the caregiver for a person with Alzheimer’s. As the disease progresses you have to do more and more for the person until, in the author’s case, the loved one was put in a care facility that took care of all his needs. The author now was not needed at all, causing the first sense of loss. With Alzheimer’s, more so than any other disease, there are several epochs of experiencing loss.
I was reading this when I heard Cindy hovering around the bottom of the attic stairs. I knew she was indecisive about something, but surprised by the timing. A companion from our regional CHORE service was here to help Cindy bake bread. I know that Cindy wants to do things, know that she wants to still be able to bake her locally famous cinnamon bread. The companion was there to do a better job of guiding Cindy with this task than I would, while allowing me to work up in my attic office.
I called down to ask what was up. Cindy struggled with the words as usual, but I got that the companion was doing everything for her; she did not know how to assert her need to be doing the work herself to the extent that she was capable. I went down to straighten things out, then came back up to finish reading the blog entry.
There’s a fine balance to caregiving. You could do too much for your own sake; you could do too little for your own sake. In either case what can help is identifying and nurturing those things a person with Alzheimer’s can and wants to do for his/her own sake.
