Published in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch shares his story of being unprepared for one of life’s certainties – the decline of a parent. This is an excerpt from his powerful article:
“I can say, from experience, that convincing caregivers they need help is not easy, at least not until they need it too much. Americans pride themselves on resilience and independence. We don’t want to burden others with our problems. We don’t like to acknowledge that a crisis is happening or imminent. Above all, we prefer to assume that our own and our parents’ declines will be smooth and uneventful. By keeping the problem out of sight and consigning it to the realm of the “personal,” the culture enables our natural tendencies toward denial, procrastination and silence.
At one point, as I struggled with my father’s crisis, I joked to friends that we should all be given time off work at age 40 to take a course on elder care. I no longer see this as such a joke. A few big companies realizing that caregiving responsibilities drain employees’ time and productivity are making available seminars like Powerful Tools for Caregivers, a six-week course on subjects like “Taking Care of You” and “Mastering Caregiving Decisions.” That seems like exactly the right idea. If employers can provide seated massages and host blood drives, surely they could be a conduit for elder-care training and information. Surely toll-free hotlines would not be so hard to set up and publicized ubiquitously. Surely HR departments and health providers and clergy could be trained to respond, on learning that an employee or patient or congregant has an elder-care “issue,” with a nudge towards resources, rather than just, “I’m so sorry for what you must be going through.”
What we need even more than that, though, is for our nameless problem to be plucked out of the realm of the personal and brought into full public view, where help can find us. In the years after Betty Friedan named their problem, women who work in the home (formerly “housewives”) demanded an got a new infrastructure for support: opportunities to study and work at home, part-time job opportunities, public and private help with child care, social networks and so on. Perhaps more important, they demanded and got society’s recognition that they were providing an indispensable public good. As a result, they are not isolated or silent anymore, and they do not need to put up with being lonely or bored. Keeping today’s invisible infrastructure of caregivers out of sign is as stressful and wasteful and pointless as leaving millions of women feeling stranded at home once was. My mother’s friend and the feminist of her generation fundamentally had it right. There should be no need for anyone to go through this alone, and no glory in trying. “
To view the complete article visit:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/letting-go-of-my-father/8001
