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Managing The Stress ~ Making The Decisions ~ Discovering The Meaning |
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Caregiving |
Solutions To Your Caregiving Situations Throughout Your Caregiving Years |
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Hidden Blessings Finding the positives when only negatives seem to call Editor's Note: How do you find the hidden blessings? We asked Maggie Davis, author of Caring in Remembered Ways, to shed light on finding the blessings in a trying and strenuous experience. Caregiving: Sometimes, during extended periods of trauma and trials and tribulations, we lose our ability to see the good. We can only see the bad, the losses, because we're just too tired and overwhelmed to see anything else. Can you help us understand how to see the hidden blessings in situations that we would call our greatest tests? Maggie: Thank you for asking this question. It is a strong one. I can best answer it this way: A few years ago, I was sitting at the bedside of a friend with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). No other visitors or aides were present, as they had been in the previous months of visits. I had met this man soon after he had received his diagnosis, one year prior. For several months, through Neighborcare, I scheduled meals every day and visits for him. Now, although barely able to speak, he talked of his gains and losses. He told me how he felt watching Bill Moyers program which featured two people with ALS. He said, having seen these two sufferers, how grateful he was for his own life. Word by word, he recalled his losses, in particular: Not being able any longer to feed himself, not being able any longer to wipe his private parts, not being able any longer to secure for himself a moment’s guaranteed and uninterrupted privacy. And then he spoke of his gratitude, which seemed to be the balm for all of it. Mostly his gratitude was for the boon of laughter in his life, though I say it is my friend who inspires this. He jokes and responds to jokes, even while being swung through his bathroom “buck naked” during his ablutions. Laughter, he says, has helped him bridge his losses. Laughter and the love all around carries him, though this was not always available. Hearing my friend tell his story I was reminded that we are all stars of our own. Through the holy act of listening—seeing each other—we polish our own lives. We remember who we are, truly, despite moments of exhaustion and loneliness and neglecting ourselves or forgetting our own beauty. Sometimes we slip. Sometimes we rise. And there we are. There we are, alone together in this life of ours, perfectly imperfect, doing what we can the best way we know. Around this same time, I watched the video, Joe the King. Somehow enduring the F--- words and the grimness of one boy’s--one family’s--life, I found this film to be a fine one and, surprisingly, not depressing. I was reminded that the sorriest, sorest lives can be sustained, even saved, by minuscule doses of kindness. This reminded me that by offering these doses to ourselves and others, with greater and greater frequency, in grander and grander proportion, whenever we can manage, we become miracle makers—exhaustion, overwhelm and losses notwithstanding. These doses are not the niceties of caregiving; they are the necessities. Some caregivers receive respite; some don’t. Those who don’t can learn to open enough to see the smallest hidden blessings, for surely their store feels empty. The day after my beloved old dog Buddy died, few friends were there for me. At dawn, in my driveway, I called out for mercy. Buddy had been such a good friend and I missed him. Within the hour, five deer appeared by the road in the mist as I drove by. (I hadn’t seen even one deer in months, and seeing deer soothes me.) A cyclamen bloomed that hadn’t flowered in a year-and-a-half. A string of people I hardly knew hugged me and told me stories of their own animals, dying; this, to comfort me. Receiving these gifts, I learned that blessings and love can come from anywhere; this knowing has sustained me. Caregiving: How can we turn our "blue" days--those days when the world just seems too hard and heartless for us--into days that lead us to greater thankfulness and joy? Maggie: For me it is always the small actions that ease. I light a candle. Ring a bell. Smell a rose. When I do this with intention, when I do it prayerfully for all who do not understand what good this can bring--who do not know how delicious it is to connect in these simple ways--and are missing out, I’m lifted. When we rejoice for those who have what we do not have, but long for, this increases our opportunity for joy. The logic of this is clear, even when our hearts falter: If we’re happy when we enjoy what we have and happy when others enjoy what they have, then we can be happy all the time, no matter the circumstances of our lives. The potential for ourselves and for the world are endless, here. Caregiving: Can you offer some stories about hidden blessings--some struggles you've faced that have later turned into your greatest blessings? Maggie: Caring for my parents while each was dying sowed the seeds for Neighborcare. Now I do for others, in my parents’ honor, what I hadn’t known enough—or understood enough, or been inclined—to do before. You read about people who have lost children in horrible ways, only to turn those times into blessings for others. Mothers who have lost sons or daughters to drunk drivers choose to actively forestall similar tragedy in others’ lives. If we don’t transmute our grief it can sink us. Of course, we can’t transmute what we don’t let ourselves feel. Hooray for us, even if all we can say at first when we suffer is simply: “Others are feeling this.” For surely others do, and they might welcome the thought that someone they don’t know cares for them in that moment, wherever in the world that may be. Who can know the repercussions for good that are born from this--wherever we are, whoever we are, choosing to be family to each and all. Sometimes when we feel like breaking away, we might well go deeper. I lived with my mother for the six months before she died. Many times I wanted to run from her. I was an only child, and she was so ill. I did have a little respite. My mother did have good friends. Still, I often felt lacking. When I could move closer, not move away or detach myself, she and I reached new ground. Caregiving: What suggestions/advice would you give family caregivers to find their hidden blessings? Can you offer any daily practices/exercises that will help them uncover the hidden blessings? Maggie: When I feel overwhelmed or forsaken and cannot extricate myself, I surrender, turn the matter over to God as I know God, ask for mercy for myself and also for others who may be tired or despairing. This last gesture also brings great comfort when I am feeling isolated. Let me tell you a story. Years ago, my daughter, Jen, and I shared two weeks in my cabin in the woods, thrilling to each other’s company. The day Jen flew home to Colorado I didn’t know when I’d be seeing her again. I returned to my cabin a bit soggy from missing her. By some stroke of grace, then, I began thinking of mothers in Viet Nam who, during the Viet Nam war, had sent their children by boat to a new life, not knowing if their children would survive, aware they most likely would never see their children again. I thought of mothers in Tibet, dispatching their children over the mountain to sanctuary. My own missing fell away. Focusing on others, I was in good company. See the story of everything--every spider, every worm, every flower. Love is not love that is divided. Some for you, but not for you. Love is. Seeing deeply brings us to understanding, which brings us to love, which brings us to taking good care, which brings us round to seeing deeply. Who was is that said, It is not who cares for us we love most, but who, willingly and with heart, we care for, for then we reap the harvest of our own compassion. At an all-volunteer, free-of-charge center for the terminally ill, a man was admitted who tested his caregivers sharply. The man complained unceasingly about the woman who was dying in the room next to his. Her singing to herself bothered him. But the man’s caregivers did not sink to his way of speaking and acting. Cheerfully, they cared and cared (though, granted, there were many of them to share this challenge). In time, the man sweetened. He bought not one, but two, birthday cakes for the woman next door and was concerned when too long a time had passed between her singing. Maggie Davis is an author, publisher and volunteer community caregiver living in East Blue Hill, Maine. In 1993, after being published in New York and elsewhere for nearly two decades, she created Heartsong Books. In 1995, Maggie co-founded NEIGHBORCARE, a joyful band of volunteers offering free-of-charge, health-related assistance to neighbors in thirteen towns on the Blue Hill, Maine peninsula and beyond. To read The NEIGHBORCARE STORY go to: http://heartsongbooks.com/neighbor.html. |
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