Grief - Alzheimer's, Hospice, Loss, Recovery.

(This is an adaptation of something I posted at Communion of Dreams yesterday.  For those who may not have seen my other posts about caring for my Mother-in-Law, Martha Sr, for the past five years, she passed away on Feb. 6th.  This is something of a follow-up to that series.  I am tentatively planning on adapting those diaries into a book about the experience, in no small part due to the response I received here at dKos.  Yes, you guys helped - and you have my gratitude.)

It is enlightening, if sometimes dismaying, to discover what sorts of things motivate people.  I have found that one of the most reliable ways of doing this is to see what sorts of motivations they perceive in others - what motives they attribute for a given behaviour.

Case in point: our caring for Martha Sr.  I had mentioned previously that there was some discord in the family about the distribution of her estate.  And what at the time seemed to be a misplaced guilt (that still may be the base motivation, actually) causing this has now manifested as a perception that we cared for her over the last five years out of some financial motivation.  Yes, it seems that some thought that we did what we did in order to benefit from a more favorable disbursement of her estate.

Sigh  This is so wrong that it took me a while to really wrap my head around it.

As I told a friend via email this morning:

Needless to say, this is not why we did what we did - honestly, no amount of money (well, no reasonable amount of money) would be sufficient inducement for me to have cared for someone like that for so long.  It was done out of love - for her, and for my wife.

And I've been thinking more about it.  Why?  Because I like to understand my own motivations, and to keep them as honest and clean as possible.  I'm an idealist, and try to approach the world that way, knowing full well that the world is not an ideal place and that reality will likely not be kind to my approach.  When my motivations are questioned, either directly or by events, I like to step back and reconsider - and will make changes if necessary to insure that my motives are clear.

We were favored by Martha Sr. in her will.  Not to a great degree - the value of it was less than I could have earned in the intervening years, had I been working rather than caring for her.  And it was considerably less than would have been spent on either hiring full time care-givers, or moving her into a nursing home for that time.  But because this additional benefit was there, some made the assumption that this was our motivation for caring for her.  And this has caused the discord mentioned above.

So, after discussing the matter with my wife, we're going to wipe out the benefit, just split up her estate equally and without consideration.  It is not worth the grief.  We didn't do what we did for money or property - we did it because it was the right thing to do, and we could.  Removing the benefit should resolve in anyone's mind what our motivation was.

Everyone grieves in their own way.  We may have wiped the slate clean, but that doesn't mean that the grieving process is over.  Not by a long shot.  There are still sympathy cards on the mantelpiece.  There is still a sudden slight panic over where the monitor is when I forget for a moment that Martha Sr is gone.  There is guilt over the times we failed in some way, and joy over memories of happy moments Martha Sr had even in those final difficult days.  And there is a profound gratitude I feel in having experienced this role of being a care provider.

I think that I am richer for this experience than others who have not been through it.  I sometimes wonder whether the tendency to put people in nursing homes is partially done out of a fear of grieving - to create a distance from a loved one who is reaching the end of life, and so to mitigate the pain of loss.  If so, those who take that path have indeed curtailed the amount of pain that they would feel, perhaps even cut short the time needed to completely grieve.  But they have also cut themselves off from a remarkable human experience.

Jim Downey