The Caregiver's Struggle: A New Dad's Journey To Empathy

The delivery room, 5:06PM, and she made her arrival. Transcendence!

The moment I saw her face, I looked at my wife and said, "It's a girl, and she's beautiful!"... and with that phrase spoken, nothing would ever be the same.

We then had the gift of spending every moment of our first 30 days together with her, and celebrated taking a new picture each day as a memory of watching her grow.

Since then, the past month of being new parents has supplied my wife and I with immense joy. But it is a joy that is also coupled with the daunting task of having to learn quickly and adapt to all of the many wonderful things that are necessary to do to provide for and care for someone's every need in life. In so many ways, it is a new struggle to learn to be a caregiver for a family member.

I couldn't help to make a comparison to the families that I work with every single day that are dealing with the crisis of Alzheimer's and dementia as they provide care for their loved ones. Though VERY DIFFERENT than taking care of a child, the responsibility to provide for someone's every need is still the same.

As a family caregiver:

• You are solely responsible for keeping your loved one safe.
• You are solely responsible for keeping your loved one clean.
• You are solely responsible for keeping your loved one well fed and nourished.
• You are solely responsible for your loved one's quality of life and entertainment.
• You are solely responsible for your every aspect of your loved one's life, well-being, happiness, their today, their tomorrow, and their future.

For both an Alzheimer's and dementia caregiver and for a new parent trying to navigate and learn how to provide for their child for the first time, it can be an overwhelmingly heavy task. A task that is at times very lonely at times and very joyous.

But I settled upon one key difference and it broke my heart:

The child caregiver is often renewed and REWARDED by constant positive growth, but to the contrary, the Alzheimer's and dementia caregiver is often disheartened and DEVASTATED by constant negative change.

While there are many times where my wife and I reach a level of exhaustion while providing care for our daughter, we are REWARDED with seeing so many little moments of positive growth. A smile, a coo, a new ability, a different face or expression... it all means that she is growing and that we get a front row seat to watching her become a beautiful young lady.

An Alzheimer's and dementia caregiver mostly sees the opposite. A myriad of little losses and negative changes along the way as they watch a slow decline of their loved one's cognitive ability. Instead of the reward of progress, they often only see a new loss of abilities.

It was this type of heartbreak that we experienced as a family providing care for my grandmother, and it is this type of heartbreak that was best described by a spousal caregiver to a retired doctor who explained to me:

"We watched our girls GROW-UP, but now I watch my husband GROWN-DOWN. It hurts watching him unlearn his brilliance."

Without the reward of positive growth, exhaustion could easily get the better of my wife and I. So, what then becomes the fuel for the Alzheimer's and dementia caregiver? What keeps them going beyond the infinite power of love and duty, or is that alone sustainable?

I'll strive to consistently find and share new ways for an Alzheimer's and dementia family caregiver to find the motivation for a new day of their hard work, and the reward to keep it going tomorrow and the next day with love in their heart.

If you are an Alzheimer's or dementia caregiver, please share what fuels you to keep going.

Personally, I'll never see caregiving in the same way.

~Joe Kleid