My Mom Is Dying. There Is So Much I Need to Do for Her, and Time Is Short

A caregiver struggles to support her ill mother while balancing the need for help and self-care

Barry J. Jacobs,

AARP

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En español

Published June 09, 2025

red outline of a person with various caregiving responsibilities surrounding them

Vidhya Nagarajan

Editors asked AARP Family Caregivers Discussion Group members and other caregivers to submit pressing questions they’d like family therapist and clinical psychologist Barry Jacobs to tackle in his caregiving column. Jacobs took on this hot-button topic:

Q: My mother is dying of cancer, and I feel overwhelmed with caregiving — [especially juggling] doctor’s appointments, work and making sure that she’s OK. I don’t feel the care is very good, so I’m trying to stay on top of the medical team (they missed that her oxygen was so low that she needed supplemental oxygen). But then I’m missing that she can’t shower by herself until I notice she hasn’t bathed in a while. I know it’s important to take deep breaths. And I’m trying to create memorable moments with friends because I know having some good moments is important. But I can’t enjoy them because I feel like I’m having a nervous breakdown.

(Letter edited for length and clarity.)

Barry Jacobs: That’s terrible. It sounds like you’re experiencing the drowning feeling that many caregivers have when swimming as hard as they can but being swept away by a riptide. The professionals who should be throwing you a secure lifeline aren’t. Grief about your mother’s impending death may be weighing you down like lead boots. The result is terror of going under.

Many caregivers who are slammed by wave after wave of care demands experience this. Those caring for someone who is dying are hit harder. In a disease’s terminal phase, stakes are high and time is often short. Caregivers feel greater urgency to get everything done before the end, while balancing work and other responsibilities. Still, they panic that they can’t do enough fast enough or well enough, causing their family members to suffer.

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You sound like you are doing what you can to keep your head above water during this end-of-life caregiving by taking deep breaths to relax any tension, connecting with friends for social support whenever possible and perhaps engaging in other self-care activities. But preventing a “nervous breakdown” will also require handling three separate tasks — ensuring the right care, documenting wishes and saying goodbye.

Ensuring the right care

Your question shows that you are diligently focused on ensuring your mother gets the right care at any given time. That could include helping her with activities of daily living (ADLs), such as showering, dressing and feeding, and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), such as managing finances, cleaning, shopping and taking her medications safely. Prompting her doctors to be attentive and responsive, as you point out, is a big part of caring for her well. So would be equipping her with assistive devices, such as a walker, or making environmental modifications to her home, such as putting in a stair lift if she is unsteady on her feet and at risk of falling.

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An important question to consider is whether your primary job is to be her nurse or her adult child. As her nurse, you would help her yourself with her ADLs, IADLs and any other hands-on or medical care tasks. This can be hard, time-consuming work that is often draining. As her adult child, the emphasis would be less on doing for your mother and more on being with her — talking about how she feels emotionally, remembering old times and expressing what you appreciate about each other.

You might be determined to be both her nurse and her adult child, but it is very hard to manage both roles simultaneously because the “doing” of nursing tends to crowd out the “being” of just hanging around together and enjoying each other’s company. In my opinion, the time allowed for simply being your mother’s daughter or son will matter to you in the long run. The memories you will cherish of her after her death will be the relaxed, intimate conversations you had, not helping her shower three times a week.

To focus more on being while ensuring that essential tasks still get done requires recruiting more help. There are several possibilities:

You could divide up the tasks with other relatives so that no one among you is overwhelmed by nursing duties and each of you retains your primary role as a family member.
If you have the financial means, you could hire the necessary help with showering, feeding and other care activities so that you can concentrate on being an adult child.
If your mother has been medically certified to have less than six months to live, you could ask her doctor to refer her for hospice services. Under Medicare, hospice provides nursing care, medications, medical equipment, counseling and personal care aides to help with the dirty work of caregiving, freeing you up to spend quality time with her.

Documenting wishes

We have all heard many times that it is a good idea to have an advance directive to document which care you do and don’t want if you are unable to speak for yourself, and a last will and testament to direct how your assets will be distributed upon your death. Hopefully, your mother has both because they provide family members with vital guidance. If she doesn’t, it is a good idea to ask her to prioritize completing them.

There are many other questions about her preferences you may want to discuss with her.

These aren’t morbid conversations; they are helpful. For instance, does she want a funeral, a memorial service, a celebration of life or no event? Specific hymns sung or poems recited? Does she want to be buried or cremated, and is there a special place she has in mind for her grave or the scattering of her ashes? Some older adults tell family members, “Do what you want,” but many have wishes they’d like fulfilled. When those wishes are documented, family members have direction and are therefore less likely to argue with one another about the arrangements when they are deeply grieving.

More from Barry Jacobs

Uses and abuses of caregiver silence
Pros and cons of receiving pay as a caregiver
Strength, challenges of immigrant caregivers
How to handle ‘gut check’ moments
The enduring grief of my dad's death

Saying goodbye

Some family caregivers and care receivers avoid saying goodbye to each other because it is too painful. However, in his well-known 2004 book, The Four Things That Matter Most, geriatrician Ira Byock provided a framework to make these conversations doable and meaningful, even when relations may have been rocky for many years. Byock suggested that we think about saying four things to each other at the end of a person’s life: Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. Goodbye. I’ve seen this framework, simple but profound, enable caregivers to grieve more effectively with fewer regrets and less guilt after their care receiver has died.

Just like there is no one way of caregiving, there is no one way of helping your dying mother. Ultimately, you will decide what is best according to her needs, your willingness, ability and availability and how much time is left. If you can make room in your overwhelming schedule now to just be with her and, eventually, to say goodbye, you, too, will feel gratified that you did all you could and said to her all that you should.

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Barry J. Jacobs, a clinical psychologist, family therapist and health care consultant, is coauthor of the upcoming book The AARP Caregiver Answer Book, scheduled for release on July 9, 2025. For more information, visit aarp.org/bookstore. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.