Be the Noodle: 50 Ways to be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver by Lois Kelly is a small and intimate book that is the perfect companion for someone in the job of caregiver. It consists of fifty lessons for someone thrust into this role. In each lesson the author describes an incident from her own experience in dealing with her mother’s final six months. And then she shares the lesson that she learned from that experience.
These lessons are not healthcare related. They are lessons in how to cope, how to survive and how to handle those people who want to help, but actually drag the loved one down. The lessons are also about making that time the best possible for the loved one. Let me share some of the lesson’s titles:
- Enough with the banana bread
- Did you hear about boo boo’s mother-in-law’s next-door neighbor’s cousin?
- Denial is a bad-ass energy vampire
- There will be angry words
- Dying to help: assign people what they’re good at
- Five things that really piss off caregivers
- Scared shitless and finding grace
- More thankfulness, less hope
- Grab the furlough
- Dew vs. fog, sadness vs grief
The writing is not melodramatic or hard to handle. Ms. Kelly actually has an appealing sense of humor. One of the lessons is to tell lots of sick jokes. I like that. It’s worked for me in other stressful situations.
I wanted to read this book because of my mother. Mom will be 90 next week. She has done remarkably well, living on her own, since my dad died twenty years ago. For the first time in her life she owned the title to Virginia Woolf’s novel: A Room of Her Own. In my mom’s case she had a house of her own.
My fear had been that she would follow my dad to the grave. They had been together over fifty years. Instead, my mom just blossomed. Never a gardener, she began to grow roses and her yard became a show place. She expanded her other hobbies, volunteered more, and even traveled on her own.
But now, in the past couple of years, things have changed. After a couple of mild strokes and two bad falls, she’s not as mobile as she was. But the real problem is her vascular dementia. Physically, she’s still fairly healthy, although she’s much thinner. (With dementia, she swears she just ate although it was really four hours ago.)
Mentally and emotionally we are losing her. A life-long knitter, she can no longer move the needles to make a decent stitch and not because her hands can’t work. She spends many hours napping and this in a woman who prided herself on only needing six hours of sleep a night. The three main pleasures she has left are reading, watching baseball games, and her family and friends which, so far, she still recognizes.
We’ve not been given a physical diagnosis of so many months but we have with the vascular dementia. It won’t be too much longer and she will not know her family. It is so strange to think that our mother, as herself, is terminal. It’s not right to be physically alive but terminal in every other way.
We’ve all been researching the problem and have gathered lots of books and websites that help. I’ll share those in some future post. In the meantime, I recommend Be the Noodle for anyone facing caregiving issues.
This was first posted on my blog, Joyfully Retired
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Agreed. I never thought I was vain until I had a mastectomy at age 39. I was devastated and told the doc I wanted to wake up with implants. Now at age 60, I am lopsided and wondering if I was just avoiding the inevitable. You get what you get and you
Sounds very interesting.
Grace, patience, humor, compassion and love is the answer. I am a caregiver. My most recent client has late stages Alzheimer’s. In my 9 hour shift, she doesn’t stop talking, asking repetitive questions. Do you like me? Who are you? These questions go on for my whole shift.
Her mind is gone, her husband of 65 years thinks she will get better. The question I must ask myself is. If this were me, how would I want to be treated?
She is a child, her mind is that of a little girl. It is part of the process, sadly she is a shell of who she used to be. You take things, minute by minute, not day by day…
Savor these moments with your mom. Understand it is part of the process that happens. Relish in your memories. Look for the good in the moment. Laughter is such a great medicine. Praying for you.
Thank you Birdlover, for being a caregiver! I would hope we could all be treated with the dignity and compassion, that a kind person like you would give, in our senior years!
Thank you for your kind words. What I do, is done out of love. It is in giving that we truly love.
Thank you so much for you kind and helpful words. I’m so glad to now their are caregivers like you as I know we will soon be looking for professional help. Thanks for your prayers and I in turn will pray for you.