The Lifeguard
Submitted by mlichter on 2008, April 3 - 14:13.
What is it about we caregivers that makes us do what we do? Is it an innate sense of obligation? A perceived inability to escape or avoid the situation? Guilt over possibly placing the responsibility on another or not being there for a person in need? A highly developed sense of empathy? An acceptance of just having to do what has to be done in this life? A deeper understanding of what love is? Maybe it's an amalgam of all or some of the above. I wish I could provide a definitive answer, if not for you, than for myself.
Wouldn't my life be happier if I once again had control over it, if I could focus just on me? Instead, besides matters regarding my own well-being, I am responsible for handling my mother's bills and other finances, setting up and ordering her meds, checking in on her daily, making sure a responsible professional caregiver is present to help with her daily welfare, shopping for her groceries, etc., etc., etc. It's been so long since I wasn't a caregiver that I can only presume the answer would be a resounding, "YES!"
Or would it? Caregiving isn't a life for which I volunteered. It is, however, a life I didn't reject out of hand. It was dropped in my lap by life's circumstances:
- My best friend gets AIDS; I am there to listen, keep company and assist.
- My mother-in-law is dying from lupus; I am there to pull in the childrearing and home-upkeep slack while my wife travels 50 miles nightly after work to help her mom at the hospital.
- My wife develops breast cancer; I am there to help her before and after surgery, and with much of the slack-tightening I started when her mother was ill.
- My father's heart condition worsens; I step in to help with the finances and home upkeep and to provide my mother respite.
- My wife develops an incurable, body-destroying disease; I do whatever is possible to aid her—often to her protestations and demands to do for herself what she no longer is capable of doing.
- My diabetic mother has a series of TIAs and gradually falls victim to ever-advancing dementia; there I am, in the middle of it all once again.
Could I have run from it? Possibly. But that, obviously, is not in my character. And it goes back a long way.
It seems as if I was always a lifeguard. A superior swimmer (a hint that I would always find a way to keep my head above water), I passed the Red Cross lifesaving courses at an early age and would volunteer to lifeguard at my summer camp's twice-a-day general swims rather than frolic in the lake with my campmates. With age, I soon started teaching others lifesaving skills, primary of which is to avoid at all costs a situation that would put your own life in danger. And should you find your life in danger, know the techniques to survive the situation—even if it is at the expense of the person you are trying to save.
Over time, it seems it is that last lesson I've had trouble remembering. That, and the basic lifesaving philosophy—"Reach, Throw, Go"—which is aimed at the lifeguard's accomplishing the rescue with as little exposure to danger as possible.
Rather than doing just enough, I've gotten into the bad habit of diving in to the caregiving situation—and I've paid a price in that I've long been caught in a swirling eddy from which I don't know how to escape. To swim with the tide would draw me further down the funnel; to swim against its force would exhaust me. For the moment, I'm just trying to tread water until the waters calm or I find the strength to fight my way out no matter the risk.
Remember to gauge your caregiving efforts. Understand the situation and how to protect yourself while helping another. It all goes to a saying we have around here at Caring Today: "Help yourself. Help others."