{"id":9455,"date":"2017-09-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites-stage.familylife.com\/flministries\/?p=9455"},"modified":"2017-09-26T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T00:00:00","slug":"realities-of-the-caregiving-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp-stage.familylife.com\/www\/articles\/topics\/life-issues\/relationships\/honoring-your-parents\/realities-of-the-caregiving-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"Realities of the Caregiving Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

When I was 13, my 90-year-old grandmother moved into our home.\u00a0Grandma Burke was from the Old Country and left her family to move to \u201cVisconsin\u201d from Sweden at the age of 15.\u00a0At the ripe age of 90, she became my roommate.\u00a0Grandma did not share my affinity for the Beatles or bell-bottoms, and I did not share her affinity for warm prune juice or smacking her gums when she removed her teeth.\u00a0My life was marked by the mortal fear that she would hightail it off to glory some night, and I would open my eyes in the morning and find myself staring at a corpse.<\/p>\n

One morning in the pre-dawn darkness, I lay in my bed with my eyes squeezed shut against the taunting specter of death in the twin bed across the room just inches from my own.\u00a0In the darkness, I reached for my glasses at their familiar spot on the bedside stand, but to my surprise, I found my hand unexpectedly plunging into a mason jar of icy water.\u00a0As I panicked, my fingers clamped down, and I quite unexpectedly latched on to Grandma\u2019s teeth and pulled them, dripping, from the mouth of the jar.<\/p>\n

Something inside me must have snapped as I hurled Grandma\u2019s dentures across the room with the force of an Olympic shotputter.\u00a0My screams would have killed a less sturdy 90-year-old, but Grandma Burke was a Swede who had raised 10 children during the Depression on salt pork and lutefisk.<\/p>\n

Many of us come to caregiving in a similar fashion, with our eyes clenched shut against the specter of death that hovers just beyond our vision as we grope in the darkness for something, anything, that will help us find our way on our journey.\u00a0Then comes the moment when our hand plunges into the mason jar, and we realize we\u2019ve grasped something we hadn\u2019t quite expected, something we may have never before had to face at close range.\u00a0In that moment we may ask ourselves, What have I gotten into?\u00a0What am I doing here, anyway?\u00a0<\/em>In the early days of my caregiving journey, I wasn\u2019t really sure.<\/p>\n

My caregiving journey<\/h2>\n

My husband, Dan, and I were both raised in households where grandparents were part of the family structure.\u00a0We always believed it would be our responsibility to care for our parents someday, possibly in our home.\u00a0But we had never expected those responsibilities to begin when our kids were still young enough to enjoy eating Play-Doh\u2014just 4 and 6.<\/p>\n

Dan\u2019s father, Norman, came to live with us for the first time in 1983 because of severe malnutrition due to food allergies.\u00a0His condition was so dire that he had lost his ability to recognize us or to speak.\u00a0He lived with us for four months while we sought medical treatment and nourished him back to health.\u00a0Six years after his first recovery he returned, with only 117 pounds clinging to his six-foot-two-inch frame.\u00a0Once again malnutrition was the cause.\u00a0This time he lived with us for six months while he regained physical and mental strength and we found an allergist whose treatment allowed him to eat normally for the remainder of his life.<\/p>\n

Then in 2000, when Norman\u2019s friends called again and told us of his depression and anxiety, we knew that short-term interventions were no longer an option.\u00a0Norman would live with us for four-and-a-half years.\u00a0During that time, he suffered from a number of physical and mental illnesses, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and Parkinson\u2019s disease.\u00a0He went through periods of care in hospitals and rehab centers, always returning to our home when he was well enough.\u00a0During those same years, my mother, who lives with my father back in Michigan, slipped into the abyss of Alzheimer\u2019s, and my dad began to manifest strange cardiac and neurological symptoms.<\/p>\n

My life became a surreal choreography of medical emergency flights, doctors\u2019 appointments, hospitalizations, and rehabilitations.\u00a0For years it seemed I was either racing to someone\u2019s side for an emergency room crisis or heading off for my own.\u00a0By the time Dad Beach had lived with us a few years, most of the doctors I met thought I was a doctor myself.\u00a0I knew I was certainly willing to sign up for a medical convention somewhere in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n

The conflict of expectations and realities<\/h2>\n

Then in 2004, God suddenly flung open doors that allowed us to move back to Michigan to be near my parents.\u00a0I found my dream job at a Christian university, but it didn\u2019t take long for reality to slap me in the rear.\u00a0It seemed like all the doctors we had found had conspired to work out of offices on the opposite side of the city.\u00a0My parents lived almost an hour from our new home, and I could explode a blood pressure cuff just talking about their medical needs.<\/p>\n

Every day I drove to work I could think of five reasons to be at home caring for Norman and 10 more to be in Muskegon caring for Mom and Dad.\u00a0It seemed that no matter where I was or what I was doing, I felt guilty.\u00a0My migraines were becoming more frequent and more intense, and I had put my neurologist on speed-dial.\u00a0There were days I looked at the drippy mess of my life and wanted to fling the problems and frustrations across the room like Grandma\u2019s teeth, crawl back into my bed, and pull up the covers.<\/p>\n

Then one afternoon the picture changed.\u00a0Norman took a fall while Dan was helping him in the bathroom.\u00a0Before a week had passed, he took another tumble, this time while we were at work.\u00a0That was the day we knew the inevitable had arrived\u2014we couldn\u2019t keep Norman safe in our home any longer.\u00a0The Parkinson\u2019s had progressed too far. We grieved a loss the day we moved Norman into the Michigan Home for Veterans, less than 10 miles from our house, where he lived for 11 months before Jesus called him home to really rest.<\/p>\n

The day after Norman moved, Dan and I prepared his room for my parents.\u00a0Soon after that, I quit my job at the university and began freelancing so I could have more flexibility to help share my parents\u2019 care with my brother, Paul, and his wife, Sheryl.\u00a0Right now in the morning hours, my folks are stirring in the room next to me, and that means that for today, at least, I\u2019m blessed to care for them in my home.<\/p>\n

Power in an open hand<\/h2>\n

Caregiving is difficult\u2014for us, for our families, for our loved ones.\u00a0It is messy work.\u00a0We must expect tension and turmoil, but in that tension and turmoil, we can expect redemption, reconciliation, and affirmation.\u00a0Caregiving is not a means to a promised end, but because the process reflects the character of Christ Himself, we can be assured it will transform us.\u00a0And if we approach caregiving as a journey into our own souls, asking God to reveal Himself to us, we will be rewarded by an avalanche of grace.\u00a0Philippians 4:19 promises us that \u201cMy God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Caregiving teaches us to see what is precious and valuable in life.\u00a0It teaches us what it means to live out commitment and honor.\u00a0It gives us the opportunity to love someone better who we may have struggled to love in the past.\u00a0It gives us the opportunity to demonstrate that God is sufficient and that He is a God who redeems.<\/p>\n

Caregiving is the hardest work we will ever do because it demands that we love as Christ loved, sacrificing our time, our jobs, our commitments, our friendships, and our health, while standing against the tide of culture.\u00a0We will be asked to lay down expectations of fairness and to expect stress in our family relationships.\u00a0We will be asked to crawl onto the altar, knowing God\u2019s desire is to hone us and mold us into the character of His Son.\u00a0We must be willing to search our hearts and focus the light of the Word upon our self-talk, our motives, and our actions.\u00a0Caregiving is a journey into the character of Christ.<\/p>\n

The call to the journey<\/h2>\n

The quality of our caregiving is not measured by geography\u2014whether it is given in our home, from a distance, or in a nursing home.\u00a0It is measured by how we reflect the character of Christ.\u00a0Caregiving will not look the same for every person or every family.\u00a0It has as many shapes and forms as there are needs.\u00a0True strength in caregiving lies in the paradox that our weaknesses are made strong through the sufficiency of God.<\/p>\n

The call to caregiving is the call to dip your hand in the mason jar\u2014to abandon yourself to spiritual awakening through the power of redeeming grace.\u00a0It is a call to suffer, to sacrifice, and to serve.\u00a0It is a call to abandonment and tears, to hardships and difficulties.<\/p>\n

It is a glorious call to be conformed to the image of Christ and to join the God of the universe in ministering grace and mercy to one of His image bearers.\u00a0It is a call to become a splash of magnificent magenta or burst of brilliant orange on God\u2019s eternal canvas.<\/p>\n

And what could possibly be more exciting than that?<\/p>\n

\n

Selected material from<\/i>\u00a0Ambushed by Grace, \u00a92008 by Shelly Beach. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids, MI 4950l.\u00a0 All rights reserved.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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