Alzheimer Caregiver Survival Kit

Survive Your Alzheimer Loved One with Your Sanity Intact

If you are looking after an Alzheimer loved one, you will know how easy it is to get stressed out when your day is filled with frustration after frustration. Make sure that you, the caregiver, do not become the victim of the disease along with your loved one.

I was fortunate enough to have a family physician who kept telling me that my first obligation was to myself rather than to my mother. If I had not been in good health physically and emotionally, I would not have been of much use to her.

How to Lose Your Sanity

I have a friend, though, who either did not get such good advice or else did not listen to it. He looked after his Alzheimer wife with exemplary devotion. Her life became his life. He spent almost every waking minute with her, catering to her every need, until he identified with her. His beautiful poetry describes every facet of their interaction.

At her funeral, I thought he would thank God that she was finally delivered from her affliction. Not so. He was inconsolable. His emotional embrace of her dead body was more than pitiful. It was embarrassing. Since her death, this man has been living in the memory of his departed wife. He has lost contact with the world around him, and his friends no longer know how to reach him.

I am one of them.

How not to Lose Your Sanity

I was not that dedicated a caregiver nor would I have wanted to be. I believe that I served my mother better by having a life of my own, as limited in time as it was. When she passed away, I rejoiced with her, because I knew that she was finally happy and whole again. I had prayed for her deliverance for years. I had asked God not to let her suffer but to take her into his loving embrace.

My mother's presence is still with me, not as that of the woman who did not recognise some of her own children any more, but the woman whose love nurtured me through my childhood, the woman who was my best friend as an adult. During the night when she went to be with the Lord whom she had served all her life, her life flashed before me as a string of loving experiences which she and I had shared, and I incorporated them into the tribute which I wrote to her memory.

The copyright of the article Alzheimer Caregiver Survival Kit in Natural Health is owned by Traute Klein, AKA biogardener. Permission to republish Alzheimer Caregiver Survival Kit in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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