The loss of a loved one can be an immensely challenging time, especially when you are close to the person who passed away.
Yet, at the same time, grief is a little like a fingerprint – the experience differs considerably from one person to the next. Sometimes those differences might be predictable, but other times they aren’t.
For caregivers, the process of grief can often be complicated and also confusing.
If you are struggling with any aspect of loss as a caregiver, it’s important to understand that you aren’t alone. The nature of caregiving means that many people will lose the people that they are caring with at some point, but that doesn’t necessarily make the loss easy to adjust to.
At the same time, you should be aware that there are no right or wrong emotions when it comes to grief.
People feel differently as they grieve and this is especially true for anyone who was in a caregiving role. In this post, I am going to examine some of those emotions along with my own recent experiences. In doing so, I hope to shed some light on the complexities of loss as a caregiver as well as some of the reasons for those complexities.
This is an important area to consider because all too often society tries to make us feel guilty because the way that we feel or the way that we react doesn’t fall within their criteria of ‘normal’.
Loss as a Caregiver
Typically, grief is viewed as a reaction to death. When a loved one dies, we grieve and eventually we start to live our lives again. But, for caregivers, grief is a complicated emotion.
For one thing, caregivers typically know about death long before it occurs.
If you are caring for a person with a long-term deteriorating illness, in some ways you are seeing that person die before your eyes. For some conditions, the person that you are caring for becomes just a shadow of their former self.
This is especially true for people caring for individuals with dementia, because the patient may not even recognize their own family towards the end.
But, even if this isn’t true, many caregivers have some sense that their loved one will not be around forever regardless of the specific condition that they have.
One outcome of this is that caregivers will often unconsciously start to grieve before the person they are caring for has died. The implications of this will vary from person to person. But, often this process of starting to grieve when a person is still alive means that death comes as less of a shock and can be less painful.
In many cases, the death can also seem like a positive thing (to some degree) for the person who passed away. For example, if your loved one was constantly in pain and got very little joy out of life, then it is easy to imagine that her or she might be in a better place.
At the same time, grief for a caregiver is complicated by the caregiving process itself.
Caregiving and Death
In general, being a caregiver is a challenging role.
The specifics of caregiving will vary from one situation to another, but in most cases caregivers find that they have to help the person they are caring for in a wide variety of ways. That assistance can be physically and mentally draining, especially when you are a caregiver for an extended period of time.
Frequently, this can leave a caregiver with very little time, resources or energy to care for their own needs.
Realistically, a caregiver should be practicing self-care to find ways to meet their own needs. This can include having some treats and taking time off from caregiving sometimes. Those approaches can certainly make caregiving easier to cope with, particularly in the long-term.
But, in practice, many caregivers don’t practice much self-care at all.
There are a range of reasons for this. For example, sometimes caregivers feel that they simply do not have the time or the energy to meet all of their own needs. Likewise, caregivers often feel that they are being selfish when they do something for themselves, especially when the needs of the person being cared for seem to be more pressing.
In many cases, a caregiver may also feel like they have nobody to turn to for support.
Not practicing self-care can increase the challenge of caregiving dramatically, but even those who do self-care still find caregiving tiring and difficult.
This challenge can sometimes make caregivers resentful of the person they are caring for or it can damage the relationship between the carer and person receiving care in other ways.
All of these factors complicate the grief process.
For one thing, the loss of the person you are caring for typically means that life gets a lot easier. This mightn’t happen at first (because of challenges like arranging a funeral), but over time the carer will tend to find that they have fewer burdens and more time.
This tends to mean that they are able to focus on their own needs.
Emotionally, this can be incredibly confusing.
One the one hand, you lost a person who was very important to you, but on the other hand, you are finding that your own life is changing and possibly improving.
Likewise, if you were already grieving for some time, then the death of your loved one might not be a large shock emotionally.
It can be hard to know how to respond to all of this.
My Own Experience
I was a caregiver for my husband for roughly five years. In the early days, my role was simple, but as his health deteriorated my role grew. It grew to the point that I had no time to take care of my own needs and often had to choose between helping him and helping myself.
Self-care is an important process for any caregiver and it is far too important to neglect. Ideally, I should have been able to turn to friends or family members to share the burden. However, the fact that I was caring for a husband rather than a parent made this much more complicated and in my case, there simply was no one else to turn to.
I don’t begrudge my husband anything that I gave him. We were there for each other and we both did everything we could to ease the burden on me – but, our options were limited.
I lost my husband six months ago and for me, grief has been complicated.
The first part of that grief, I suppose, is fairly typical. I lost my husband who I loved dearly and I feel empty and adrift without him. Even though he relied on my physically, I relied on him emotionally and as a result, I often feel that I lost a lot of the purpose in my life.
At the same time though, my husband was never healthy and we always knew that there was a good chance he would die long before me. We had even talked about the topic in the past, including the idea that the purpose behind our relationship was partly so that he would be happy at the end of his life.
I don’t think either of us fully believed that he would die and we certainly didn’t think that it would happen any time soon. But, those conversations did put that thought into my mind and probably helped me to accept his death easier than I would have been able to otherwise.
When I lost my husband, everything changed for me emotionally and physically.
He was my only family in the United States, and as such, my only response was to return to my home country.
Essentially, the loss of my husband meant that I was starting many parts of my life over again. That process has meant that in many ways I am doing better. Specifically, I have the time to care for my own physical health now and I actually have free time.
I find that I feel guilty because of this.
Does that mean I didn’t love my husband? No, not at all.
We were happy but at the same time he was in a lot of pain much of the time. So, while the concept of death terrified him, it would also have bought him some peace – and I am thankful for that.
That combination of grief and relief is particularly common among caregivers and it can be a hard one to adjust to.
In many ways, the simple answer is time.
It takes time to grieve and time to adjust to the way that life has changed.
Another thing is simply being patient with yourself.
Grief isn’t predictable and you may well feel emotions that seem out of place. It is perfectly normal to feel some degree of relief when you lose a loved one, especially if you were caring for them. That relief doesn’t mean that you loved them any less.
It just means that you’re human.
The Reality of Grief
There is no simple way to look at grief. Often, society expects people to be doing ‘okay’ within a few weeks or months after a significant loss. Yet, people often find that it takes more than a year before the grief stops being raw.
Ultimately, the grief that you experience will be unique to you and to your circumstances – and there isn’t a correct way to grieve. This is especially true for caregivers who tend to face many conflicting emotions surrounding loss.
But, grief is also a process and over time some of the harshness of grief disappears and coping becomes easier.
If you’re struggling with grief after the death of a loved one or while a loved one is still alive – finding someone to talk to is a powerful tool. Depending on your situation, that someone might be a counselor or it might simply be a friend. Regardless of who it is, you want to be talking to someone who can understand what you are experiencing and isn’t going to judge your emotions.
After all, people do often experience some degree of guilt as part of grief, the last thing you want is to be talking to a person that is going to make you feel worse.
For myself, I am finding grief is still very much of an ongoing process and I suspect it will be for quite some time. Certainly, the grief is no longer as raw as it once was. Likewise, I’m coming to terms with the idea that it’s okay for me to be happy with my current life, regardless of the circumstances that led me here.
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