Reflections on the life relinquished to care for a loved one

I decided to go out to lunch today, and as soon as I sat down I started reading Measure of the Heart: A Father’s Alzheimer’s, A Daughter’s Return Home, by Mary Ellen Geist.


The book starts with the author’s very brief recap of leaving a successful career as a journalist to return home and care for her father. The “unkempt hair, no makeup, and a look of exasperation” in her eyes and those of others who’ve done the same. Faces like her mother’s “that seem to say, This shouldn’t be happening to me. I don’t deserve this. This was supposed to be the best time in our lives...” “The daughters whose eyes I meet... Sometimes we look very, very lost. Almost as lost as our parents who have Alzheimer’s.”


And suddenly, I’m thrust back into those feelings, into having given up a career — a business in my case — and professional activities, professional aspirations, friends, my plan to adopt a child, on and on, all those feelings of loss. And that was before things got hard with my dad, when his memory was slipping significantly but he just needed some support.


Now that my beloved Daddy been gone almost 19 months, I still have no desire or energy to restart my business. I hit the brakes when he went into hospice, expecting for it to last a few months, but he lived for two and a half years, and closing out his house took more than a year. Starting again from scratch is a mountain I’m not ready to climb. I’m grateful for the opportunity to run The Purple Sherpa, though I wish the hard work came with a paycheck at times when I’m wondering how I’ll pay my bills — something I never wondered Before. (Something I’m grateful to find a way to answer every month, especially grateful since I know many others aren’t able to answer as easily.) I’ve moved to a home I love, I’m spending time where I want to, I’ve resumed an important professional leadership position that has been a decades-long goal. There’s much good in my life, but it’s unrecognizable compared to what it was and what I thought it would be. And it’s all tinged with loss.


Make no mistake: I would do it all again, every minute. The good, the bad, the hideously ugly.


But reading this has taken me back in time, left me in tears in the middle of a restaurant, tightening my throat too much even to swallow the garlic Parmesan fries I’ve been anticipating for weeks.


This is what people who haven’t been through this experience can never understand.