Like a cat burglar breaking in with nary a sound, grief can intrude without warning, unacknowledged, even while caregiving is ongoing.
Consider a caregiver approaching the breaking point – balancing appointments, medications, bill-paying, inquiries of relatives and friends seeking updates, and on top of all that the need for empathizing with the patient.
It’s a full plate, a set of tasks that would tax a hired hand – but a caregiver is often not just a hired hand, rather one of the “inner circle,” maybe the spouse or a sibling of the patient, maybe a child or a long-time friend. And with such a close relationship, the caregiver is dealing not only with a patient who’s very sick, perhaps even dying, but also with something internal, something deeply troubling and indeed even frightening: emotional response to the traumatic impact of impending personal loss.
Caregivers often set aside their own priorities to deal with the pressing needs of a sick loved one, but there are some things that can’t be set aside.
The oft-cited “stages of grief” are not items on a to-do list that can be postponed or passed off to someone else – they are, rather, classic elements of response to loss, and they can deeply impact a caregiver, even well before the object of care has reached maximum improvement – or, in the case of hospice-type care, the final curtain. And that can present a special challenge – the burden of caregiving while simultaneously grieving.
In this next blog series, I want to address the impact of grieving during the period of time when ongoing caregiving is actually taking place. In future posts, I hope to consider the stages of grief as they arise at a different point in time, and from different angles – in particular, grief that manifests after the death of a patient for whom one has been a caregiver, and also the “grief” that accompanies the “letting go” of the very caregiving experience itself, where that experience has given a meaningful sense of belonging or importance to the caregiver.
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