Anger May Fade to Sadness and Regrets After Caregiving Ends

I feel guiltier, too. Her suffering is more evident to me in hindsight. My many grievances about her seem beside the point. I’m sorry for specific instances when I lost my temper at her. Why did I begrudge her the magnanimous gesture of taking her home health aides out to lunch every day? My disapproving reaction seems petty.

I know I'm not the first or last family caregiver to be angry and then regretful. This is not  an emotional  aftermath that any of us wants. How can caregivers avoid it? Here are some ideas.

With death, caregiving may end but the caregiving relationship doesn’t: My mother’s fair face, Bronx-inflected voice, and love of vanilla ice cream are still clear in my mind. So are our sometimes-snippy, sometimes-heated exchanges. None of that has died for me. That proves the import of another aphorism: Take the long view — always. Caregivers should practice a kind of “ prehindsight ,” considering how they may look back upon and judge their caregiving performance from some vantage point yet years away. By doing so, they’ll hold themselves to greater accountability every day by their own future reckoning. That was a piece of my advice I failed to take to heart as I got caught up in the daily tiffs and challenges.

Anger comes too easily; sadness too hard: The frequent debating between me and my mother served important psychological functions for us both: It kept us intensely engaged with one another, gave us an outlet to vent our respective frustrations, and prevented us from focusing too much on the overwhelming medical crisis. For my mother — incensed at her loss of cognitive and physical abilities and control over her life — it was easier to direct blame at me than squarely face what was happening to her. For me — shocked and appalled by the spectacle of my mother’s slow disappearance — arguing with her was my unconscious means of reassuring myself she still was capable of fiery presence. The problem, though, is that we badly hurt one another’s feelings at times. Talking frankly together about her condition and the mounting losses might have brought us closer together in sad communion.

Try a little tenderness: That was the title of one of my favorite Otis Redding soul ballads from the 1960s. There were small loving moments for us — a light touch on the shoulder, sharing a turkey special sandwich that we both loved, and sitting quietly together in a spring garden — but they came too infrequently. Fortunately, those times are also there in my mind. I don’t regret them. I cherish them. I only wish she’d seen more of them.