Quotes About Caregiving

I gave three years of my life to take care of my dying mother who had Alzheimer's disease. Being there for her every need for three years might have looked codependent but it wasn't because it was what I wanted to do.

I think a lot of trainers are forgetting to take care of themselves and focusing only on their clients. You see it with doctors, nurses, and caretakers. If you put too much effort into only helping others, you are neglecting yourself, and your health is the only thing that makes it possible for you to help others.

Her face became tougher and leaner, the face Cara-vaggio would meet later. She was thin, mostly from tiredness. She was always hungry and found it a furious exhaustion to feed a patient who couldn't eat or didn't want to, watching the bread crumble away, the soup cool, which she desired to swallow fast. She wanted nothing exotic, just bread, meat.

I raised my sister. I was six when she was born. My mother had to make a living for herself and it was very hard, so I was looking after my sister, cooking and cleaning, and she had four jobs.

We need to acknowledge that families come in multiple shapes and sizes, that love is not a finite asset, and that caregiving involves more than a genetic imperative.

When my mom was sick and in the hospital, I did for the first time feel really bad that a lot of men aren't taught how to take care of other people very well. It's not as important of a skill for them as other things, in the same way that I really resent not being given a toolbox when I was younger.

Wilson has to leave early. He got the call earlier this morning: there is a bed for his wife in a nearby hospice. If she is going to take it, she must move today. The doctors still don't understand what is wrong with her, only that her self and her strength are ebbing away, and there seems no stopping it. Wilson's afternoon will be spent getting his wife, with whom he's traveled the world, ready for her final journey.

Those last months. No way of wrapping it pretty or pretending otherwise: Rafa was dying. By then it was only me and Mami taking care of him and we didn't know what the fuck to do, what the fuck to say. So we just said nothing. My mom wasn't the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities-shit just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it. She just seemed to take it, never gave anything off, not light, not heat.

But I've come to terms with the fact that you never escape your parents. The roles are simply reversed. You become your parents' parents. - Lisa Holgersson

I think maybe when you live with someone who is really very ill for a long time, it somehow gives you more of a greedy appetite for life and maybe, yes, you are less measured in your behaviour than you would otherwise be.

I lived in New York until I was eleven years old, when my mother left my two older sisters and my father. My mother is 90 percent blind and deaf. She left and moved all the way to California. So I left my two older sisters and my father behind at the age of eleven and moved cross-country to take care of her.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother's illness. She had Parkinson's disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time... All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn't want to get trapped.

Caring for someone who is terminally ill is traumatic, but it's a privilege too. It's part of being a woman.

In 2009, I served as AARP's Ambassador of Caregiving. With a producer and cameraman, I traveled the country for months, interviewing hundreds of caregivers.

He had Parkinson's disease for about, I'd say diagnosed for about 11 of the last years of his life. And treatment was not as good as it is now, of course. We're still going along and he died in '85 and he was 77.

Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower.

The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us.

I finally figured out that it's not possible to have a real partner in life because relationships are inherently sexist," she said. "You have to be the mommy and the caretaker and when they want to have sex, you have to want to have sex and at a certain point a part of me would say, 'Why? Why am I

I was the kind of kid that always loved babies. I was, you know, four years old, and I would have my baby doll that I would bring with me everywhere and fake breastfeed on the beach and diaper.

What happened to you as an infant has a profound impact on this capacity to love and be loved.

the capacity to be connected in meaningful and healthy ways is shaped by our earliest relationships. Love, and loving caregiving, is the foundation of our development

The roots of health are rhythm and regulation. When you mix in attentive, responsive, and nurturing caregiving, the roots and trunk of our brain's Tree of Regulation are being organized (see Figure 2).

Oprah: In every single interaction, there is a moment when we all wonder, Do you see me? Do you hear me? Children know from birth whether their caregiver's eyes light up when they enter a room. They sense and respond to tenderness, playfulness, compassion, and patience. They know the true feeling of quality time. They know they are loved.

Dismissive caregiving can lead to an unquenchable thirst for love. You cannot love if you have not been loved.