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A caregiver's role involves many emotions and striking a balance between these emotions is a challenge for the caregiver. However, if you separate the emotions from the tasks involved in care giving, much of the things like doing grocery shopping, or the laundry, paying the bills or handling the paperwork are pretty routine. Looking after your aging parents' household chores is not caring. It is the emotional support you can provide to them in their twilight years that makes the difference.
If you are helping your elderly parent through the trial of coping with a terminal illness, they will need all the emotional support you can provide them. Although they may put up a brave front, they may be experiencing emotional turmoil due to the realization of the approaching end of their lives. As a caregiver your personal emotions at dealing with this reality, is grief. You have to try to cope with the grief together, as best as you can. At the funeral of an elderly person who has passed away due to a terminal illness, you often find that the primary caregiver is not grieving as much as the others. This is because he or she has been trying to cope with the idea for some time and has usually got used to it by then.
The two emotions associated with eldercare are compassion and pity. Your emotions as a care giver in the final months of the terminally ill elder have a direct effect on how you carry out the task of care giving. The emotion of pity involves feeling sorry for your parent's suffering whereas the emotion of compassion will make you understand the need of your parent, apart from feeling the pain, and try to help in any manner possible.
As a care giver, you have to manage your emotions and influence your reaction to the elderly parent's illness. A compassionate caregiver is most successful in his endeavor to make the elder's life comfortable. There are three important factors to keep in mind to help manage your emotions and control your reactions to the difficult times that lie ahead, and these are:
• Focus your energies and attention on the person you are caring for and not on yourself. Focusing on them builds a bond between the two of you whereas focusing on yourself will breed resentment and self pity.
• Do not dwell on the problem, but instead try to find a solution to it. Focus on the solution to a problem and not on its effects. A good doctor will cure the disease, not the symptoms.
• Focus on the joyful moments and not on the grief and sadness. Take one day at a time and try to find moments of joy when your parents can share a good laugh with you or enjoy a meal or a good film. Being together and sharing the joys and also the pain is the core of the caregiver's role.
Keeping these three facts in mind will help to keep your emotions under control. It will also help you to function out of compassion and not pity. This will help you to keep your perspective ease the pain and grief to some extent.
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