How To Get Out Of A Sinkhole
“For diagnosis after diagnosis: a skipped dinner, whispered questions to the sky, an uneasy coming-to-terms. “This hole is not bottomless,” you lie to your husband before bed. “This climb is not solitary,” he says, resting his forehead against yours.”
Reflection: To feel that your loved one's needs are bottomless is one of the most hopeless, despairing feelings I've felt. It's like a sinkhole; one you will never escape from. It's monstrous in size because it's never ending, there is no reprieve. It wears on your self-esteem. You internalize it to, "Because I can't fill this hole, this need, there must be something wrong with me."
For awhile, I saw it as two options: 1) Continue to be sucked in to the sinkhole of dementia or 2) Walk away from taking care of my mom.
Walking away was not an option for me, even though I watched as other people in her life chose it.
Eventually, gosh after a long time, I saw there was some middle ground. There was room to embrace the both/and instead of the either/or.
If I accepted that her needs and wants were endless, and no matter what I did, dementia would still demand more, I could make small stakes choices. Choose not to answer the phone on nights when I was depleted of energy. Say to her, "I love you and I don't like how you're talking to me, so I am going to hang up now" and then actually hit the red button on my phone.
Maybe when faced with a situation that seems it could swallow us, one that we are not willing to walk away from, we can made small decisions to save ourselves from getting lost in it.