Caregiving Has No Deductible

I run a monthly group for caregivers of elderly or disabled parents, relatives, or  friends.  Usually, there is respite care on premises so the caregiver can bring his loved one and leave them with the respite care worker and then attend the meeting.

Yesterday, the respite worker did not show up so one of the new members to the meeting brought in her Dad who has Alzheimer’s.

I am a talker in these meetings.  Questioning.  Probing.  Trying to give everyone a bit of spotlight as well as listening time.

This month I decided on a theme of “Setting One’s Table”.  Each day, what and who do you bring to your table to nourish you? The idea being that caregivers need to bring to their daily table activities as well as people who give and nourish  them at the same time they give to their loved ones.  I asked them to write down their favorite meal, favorite activity that they love to do, and who they’d love to have sitting at their table every day.

I bought in paper towels for placemats as our budget is–well, non existent.

And, I brought in a vase of fresh flowers from my own table.  Summer or winter I always set my table with flowers.

Then, I placed a sugar cookie I had just baked (refrigerator ones, people, don’t be thinking i’ve gone Betty Crocker on you) and unloaded my cookie frosting canisters and sprinkles containers that I use with my grand nieces and nephews.

I asked them to decorate the cookie to suggest what kind of month they had and then the group would try to guess.  Only after they explained their cookie, could they eat their cookie. (Free refreshments are not exactly free when I run the group.)

The first question from the new member was “Do you have any black frosting?”

And, the whole group began to laugh uproariously.

No one needed to say why.  We all knew why.

What proceeded was an hour of laughter and quite creative cookie decorations!  I could kick myself now for not photographing each and every one.  One elderly couple whose cookie had tear drops on it because they had to get a new roof for their house, and who used to care for aunts and uncles who are now deceased, wished their adult children who are living all over the country, could be back at their table each night like they used to be when they were growing up.  Another new member whose Mom with dementia lives with her said she’d like her deceased Dad  to be at her table each night.  “He’d be good to have there…” she said dipping her fingers ever so slightly into her frosting of dense rainbow colors.

Amidst the river of laughter, of course, was this twin river of sadness and longing, which flows a bit deeper and more silently always always always 24-7 with any caregiver.  Occasionally, when a member would explain their cookie’s decoration, eyes would fill up or mist, throats catch, heads nod.

At a particularly rollicking moment, I looked over at the father with dementia and he was smiling smiling smiling a twinkle in his eye.

At another, a member smilingly explained that her cookie suggested ups and downs, that both her elderly parents (they live with her) were in the emergency room, simultaneously, at the beginning of the month for their own specific medical emergencies, but that things turned out OK in the end.  When I asked her to tell a little more detail about how it turned out Ok in the end, she said, “Well, my mother’s chemotherapy drugs are now going to cost $300 a month because she has reached the maximum on her deductible and she was all worried about it and I said, “I’ll pay for it, Mom.  You are going to get what you need.”

Eyes, all tired eyes in that room, blinked.

Look around you today, people, find someone caring for their parent or spouse or relative and bring them something of value: listen to them.  They are invisible and their daily heroics never heralded.  Their stories will astound you and not nearly enough have been told during this health care debate.

I was next up after this woman to explain my cookie and I managed to defer explanation of my cookie by quickly putting my elbow in its frosting to mush up its smiley face.

Sometimes, I really do know when to shut up.

But, what is really needed is a powerful group to speak up for invisible caregivers in every city and town in this country.

Hmmmm……

©Pat Coakley 2009

PHOTOGRAPHS CANNOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION

A reminder that my new blog dedicated solely to flora and fauna photos can be viewed at Singular Sensation. I am up to 10 rules you can follow to produce blurry photos, too!

Working It Out

Today is the day I go to my local senior center and help lead a Caregiving Support Group.  I also do some work for the center on their website.

I took photographs of the twice weekly chair aerobics class several weeks ago and was waiting for the right opportunity to post my favorite of the photos.  The very reason I like it made it unpublishable on the website.  But, as is the case with many of my images, the subject often helps me address some of my own thoughts, fears and anxieties.

The focus, as you can see, is on the woman in the striped blouse to the left.

I fear my future, as many single people do, particularly when it comes to dealing with physical limitations and challenges.  But, I have lived long enough to know, however,  that a partner or adult children are no insulation or immunity to the realities of aging.

The woman with her arms down is my muse, not the ones with their arms outstretched.

I hope I am this woman in the coming years.

I hope I can put myself in the chair, whether I can do what is required at the moment or not.

Just putting myself in the chair may be the most complicated work out of my life, but this woman’s sweet striped shirt, crown of curls and stilled arms gives me hope.

©Pat Coakley 2009

PHOTOGRAPHS CANNOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION

Hands, Reaching

I shot this photograph of a chair aerobics class at The Senior Center in my town.  I was there to get some photographs to post on their website.

I took it right after listening to Garrison Keillor’s five minute radio broadcast, “The Writer’s Almanac” which each day features a poem.  The poem for this day was by Mary Olivier from a volume of poems titled, “Thirst”.  The name of the poem is:

The Place I Want to Get Back To

is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness
and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me
they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let’s see who she is
and why she is sitting
on the ground, like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;
and so they come
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way
I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward
and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years
I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can’t be repeated.
If you want to talk about this
come to visit.  I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

~ Mary Oliver ~

When I got home and looked at this particular image from the Senior Center, I paused.  Looked away.  My throat seized up with emotion that came almost instantly.

The hands reminded me of my mother and of my father and, really, so many elders lining corridors that I passed through on the way to their rooms.

Their hands were always reaching out for help, for someone to stop and take notice, and joy of joy, for someone to touch them, hug them and listen to them.

Sometimes, on blessed days, I could help my mother and my father, but not all, and I fear there were far too many un-blessed days looking back, but when the stars and planets and illness aligned, I felt as Mary Oliver did when she remembers the deer nuzzling her hand.

“Such gifts bestowed cannot be repeated”.

Caregiving can break your heart and be the gift of a lifetime at the same time.

©Pat Coakley 2009

PHOTOGRAPHY CANNOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION

Brilliant Meets Brilliant

If ever there was someone who could wave while drowning, it was Michael Jackson.  Steve Martin impersonates him here and laughter is exactly what I needed after two days of media howling.

Google Map

My friend of 45 years lived with his mother for eight years before she died last week on her 95th birthday. She died of natural causes but had suffered with Alzheimer’s for the past decade. I wrote this short story about my friend two years ago.

As his younger brother acknowledged at her funeral, “Brother, these past few years have been your finest hour”.

I couldn’t agree more. Here is yet another story of waving and drowning at the same time.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Google™ Maps, on any given day in the past six years, could zoom in and find my childhood friend sitting on the floor next to his 93 year old mother on the couch, watching her watching, “Andre Rieu: New Year’s in Vienna” on PBS.

He watches as she sings along and talks indecipherably to Andre. She may be propositioning him. She winks and makes a clicking, hey-hey sound out of the side of her mouth. My friend smokes a joint the size of Havana and calls me. It’s September, a hot September day.

“Happy New Year!” he says.

“Oh, no!”

“New Year’s in Vienna, baby!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

Today, he’s 64 and chronically unhappy with the toll age and living has taken on his eternally boyish physique, face and hands.

“I’m on a diet, “ he says. I hear her singing in the background. Or, she could be choking, which she has started doing in the last few months.

“What have you been eating today?” I ask him.

“Just apples and WASA bread. Ten Honey Crisp apples.”

“Ten…?”

“Ooooowheeee,” he says. “Andre’s hair is flying.”

His Irish Catholic family, they of creative addictions and estrangements—is fractured beyond repair. He is the only one who talks to all family members, but, then, not all have survived their addictions to continue on with their estrangements.

“Ten apples?” I say to him. “One day? Wow.” I think it may be dangerous.

“Dangerous?” He reminds me of his incarceration in California for drugs years ago, when a 6 foot 200 pound transvestite decided that he was “her” soul as well as cellmate.

Years ago, when he was asked, in a month long hospitalization following an overdose, about how he was able to swallow all those pills—he simply said, “With a fine wine.”

I decide to recite my version of W.H. Auden’s poem about suffering, how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along or watching Andre Rieu for the umpteenth time.

“Suffering is when my I can’t roll a joint the size of a toilet paper roll,” he says while taking another long drag and holding his breath, and then on the exhale, sputters, “The smoke is so thick around Ma’s head, she can’t see Andre!”

His laughter is loud. It registers on Google™ Maps as a land mass, a phantom of geography appearing through the heat of a September day—while billions eat, open a window or simply bear witness, as best they can, to those disappearing from the earth.

© Text and Photo -Pat Coakley 2007-Cannot be Reproduced without Written Permission

Dying for Beauty

We all know women who won’t leave the house without make-up BUT what if the house was on fire?

This is a true story–funny, incredulous to many. To me, the beginning of my caregiving years.

©Pat Coakley 2009

I Had No Idea

I had no idea how to do it. It seemed on the surface to be simple. Your parents take care of you. You take care of your parents. But, caregivng for me did not come with a manual.

My experience of it was similar to trying to open this package containing the microphone needed to record podcasts of Waving or Drowning® except without knives. Although, come to think of it, my mother often looked at me in ways described by one nurse as “dagger” like.

It seemed simple. But.

©Pat Coakley 2009