Month: January 2017

Life doesn’t come with a manual, and neither does caring for a loved one who is dying. And yet so many caregivers I’ve met follow such a similar pattern of behavior, it would almost seem that instructions had been written for them to follow.

It goes a little something like this:

1. tirelessly and selflessly care for a loved one for months and years on end
2. put aside all needs and wants, plans and prospects
3. feel tired and overwhelmed, yet grateful at the same time
4. immediately replace occasional feelings of resentment, with guilt
5. do this for as long as needed, until it is no longer needed
6. use newfound abundance of time following loved one’s loss to second guess and question every choice made while caring for loved one; cycle with guilt and regret indefinitely

Sound familiar? It’s human nature of course, to doubt and second guess ourselves when big things happen in our life, and to think maybe we could have done more, or perhaps we should have done something different.

But caregivers seem to do this at a whole different level. Maybe it’s because the choices they make are so big. Perhaps it’s because their end result (the loss of their loved one) is always a bad one.

What I do know is that hindsight is 20/20. Cliched maybe, but true. And the problem is that without realizing it, we take what we know now and apply it to what happened then.