Reflections of a Daughter of the Silent Generation and Mother of Generation Y
AA’s Step Eight: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.” According to a fortune cookie, my life was about to get more interesting. It was time to move on with faith and open up to the healing ahead. (Al-Anon’s Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions)
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
When we danced as newlyweds to “Stand by Me,” I didn’t know exactly what that would mean, only that we’d have ups and downs and I hoped he’d be at my side through both. The words comforted me now as they had then, and I was ever grateful.
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
Of all the things I could give Mom for her birthday, the very best would be the promise to always try to work things out with my bros. Mom cherished each one of us, in different ways, and having us all in her life, in the ways that we could be, not only made my role as primary caregiver doable, it also helped to make her life, at 85 and with dementia, complete.
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
As my spouse put it when I fretted: “getting your Mom two weeks in Maine is like completing a triple salchow – that’s something to feel good about.”
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
AA’s Step Seven: “Humbly asked our Higher Power to remove our shortcomings.” Faith in a Higher Power…It’s what helped me, Mom still in Maine for a bit longer, in another’s care. #thankGodforHannah! (Al-Anon’s Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions)
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
As we weighed the challenges of getting Mom to camp vs. her love of summers there, I remembered her advice twenty-five years earlier when I asked her about taking our newborn first to live in Prague so that Doug could take a job there: “Go for it.”
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
While it complicated her care, Mom’s inability to remember the pain or other details had its advantages: she loved taking guilt-free naps with Cinnamon and regularly expressed gratitude for her good health when I tucked her in at night.
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
After a busy spring, I was exhausted. It helped that, when our youngest played Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass on his phone, Mom danced in her chair, from head to toe.
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
It’d been fifteen years since Dad died, and I looked for him every day, grateful for all the ways he was still right here, with me.
—excerpt from Living Is for Living: A Caregiver’s Story
