No matter how devoted you are to the person for whom you’re caring, it is important to be able to balance that commitment with other family responsibilities. That is especially true for your relationship with your partner. The quality of many marriages has been harmed when one spouse focused too much for an extended period of time on an aging parent’s needs and the other spouse felt put on the shelf. This is even more true when the aging parent lives with the couple.
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In an early scene of the family caregiving movie, What They Had. the concerned but angry adult son (played with simmering resentment by Michael Shannon) tells his tough Irish-American father (played by Robert Forster) that he should think about the stages of his wife’s dementia — open his eyes to the extent of her terrible decline with more to come. He is trying to convince his stubborn father that memory-care placement can’t be avoided. The father responds with swift, thunderous dismissal: “Those stages are horseshit!”
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Laughter, enjoyment, impulsiveness, and spontaneity. These are some ingredients of “fun,” a critical part of aging that needs more focus. Laughter is indeed the best medicine. My mother is 93 years old. She is having fun now, but that was not always the case! She and my Dad moved to independent senior living about a year ago and it has been fascinating to see how they have adapted and changed. My mom goes to yoga, attends wine and cheese events and book club. I would probably not describe her as a person who looks to have “fun,” but I think she has seized the moment and taken advantage of what life is now offering.
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