By Judith Roberts, publisher
On April 23 six years ago, my dad took his last breath on earth after lingering dementia complications.
He had been sick for about four years. In that four-year time span, I found myself expecting my first daughter and watching her grow from newborn to infant to toddler. Those phases in parenthood seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. Those phases of watching my dad struggle and deteriorate seemed to last an eternity.
I’ve never been a patient person, and, for you who are reading this, you probably aren’t very patient either, if you’re being honest. It’s hard to be patient waiting for a good meal to be finished. It’s hard to be patient in traffic. But it takes a whole different level of patience to deal with chronic illness every day for year after year.
I have a lot of people who either are taking care of loved ones with chronic illnesses or who have a friend who is a caregiver for someone. And it’s hard to walk alongside those friends sometimes, to know how much they suffer and how inadequate we feel as a human race. We want to do something. We want to fix the problem – and we can’t. But we can do something else:
Just be there.
Just sit with them. Don’t offer advice or platitudes or try to fix the problem. Unless you’re a doctor, you’re not going to be able to fix it. But just being there – asking about the loved one, checking in for no reason, allowing the person to share their story and their daily details — this really helps more than you know. Six years later, I still get texts from relatives that say something like this: “Hey, you don’t have to respond, but I’m thinking about you today and I love you.”
That means so much.
Also, offer your special talent. If someone in a friend’s family is ill, you best believe I’m going to send a meal. It may not be a home cooked meal – it may be fast food – but it will be one less thing for my friend to worry about. But it doesn’t even have to have anything to do with purchasing anything – offer to watch the kids, tidy up, loan some books for avenues for mental rest. Asking, “What can I do?” sometimes can be overwhelming for the person in need. Be as proactive as you can and offer your own options.
Lastly – be careful what you say. Let’s take a hypothetical situation here. If you had met my dad before his dementia and then during his worst days, you might say, “Wow, isn’t that awful how bad off he is? Poor man, he used to do gymnastic tricks for the kids. Don’t you get sad seeing him like that?”
Yeah. I did.
It’s not that you shouldn’t say that – it’s a free country, say what you want. But choose who you say that to wisely – i.e., not his immediate family members.
Helping someone who is dealing with the illness is a loved one takes a lot of love and waiting – and often not with a miraculous result of healing. It’s the sad truth of being born that one day we will all face death.
But we don’t have to go through it alone.
For more resources of helping others with grief, I recommend “Just Show Up: The Dance of Walking through Suffering Together” by Kara Tippetts and Jill Lynn Buteyn and “Experiencing Grief” by H. Norman Wright.
