It’s being human! Reflection is good but don’t be hard on yourself. Life is difficult without going down that route.
I respect your decision but don’t be a stranger for long. We all need to support each other. Take care.
Thanks
@GillP . The time has come to leave TP alone for a while, I don't know if I will return in the future. Each cause has its own ends and so does TP rightfully in supporting anyone faced with this huge repsonsibility as well as a very challenging disease as it advances.
Today is 7 years since my dad died and I was left asking myself the question ‘what do I do now?’ having arranged the funeral and everyone else, which seemed to become my never-ending role. So, I did what anyone would do who was close enough and loved a bereaved parent enough to help them on the next part of their journey. Its very easy on a forum to make assumptions about people with no understanding of the turmoil and upset they have had to deal with on their own.
I can understand the many different views and experiences many carers have with dementia, because I have been there myself, day in and day out. All the night long as well, sometime literally tearing my hair out at 4am in the morning. Days at work utterly stressed it almost killed me with a fast heart dysrhythmia I ended up in an ED resus and being cardioverted (shocked) there and then. But the following day I went back to it and started over again. Why would anyone do this?
Don’t get me wrong, but lots of people think caring for someone with dementia is easy until they hit a wall they can’t jump over and then they realise where they stand in what is becoming ever decreasing circles. The reality begins to hit home. Yes use humour, have a good rant on TP, if your new to it then yes ask how to get LPA and most importantly ask what to do when you can’t cope anymore -that is really important, because caring is not just about doing its also about not continuing to do something that is no longer beneficial to the PWD or for ourselves as hard as that may seem at the time.
What I cannot abide is this perpetual sense of blame in a disease that completely changes how someone’s brain and mind works. As hard it maybe we must take some responsibility for how we also feel, think, and react. Those old parental-child battles are not the same thing as before dementia and we just must let go of all of that for the sake of our own sanity and to make sense of what is left in the now. My brother has continued a long-standing battle as an excuse to not engage, to not help and to abandon any responsibility and what sickened me the last time I saw him was his outright self-indulgence.
Am I over-reacting? Maybe, but I also think I am not. Maybe its time for some real change. It’s a God-awful disease and it can make the best of us experience the new and unexpected when we didn’t expect any of it at all. All we can do is just get on with it in the best way we can, while being mindful each journey, each pathway everyone of us takes is separate and unique.