Granny Rosie, as she is known to everyone, is still very much herself at the age of 92: partial to a G&T when the sun is over the yardarm, and always up for a gossip. She’s also frustrated to be in a wheelchair — she was the Hampshire Ladies Cycling Champion in 1950, a horsewoman and dog walker. She hates to “be a trouble”.
Rosie moved into our ramshackle house 25 years ago, completely independent, and a fabulous support when we had school-aged children. A decade later, my parents threw their lot in with us, too. We bought a neglected and damp Edwardian pile around the corner, which had once been a care home. As my father’s Parkinson’s threatened to become more severe, we would need ramps, grab rails, widened doorways. And I would learn how to be a carer.
“Carer” is a tricky word. It’s a noun that brings with it a hint of transaction, of imbalance. The NHS defines it as anyone who looks after someone who “cannot cope without their support”, and clarifies: “The care they give is unpaid.” This definition is all the more uncomfortable if you are caring for someone you love.
First, I was supporting my mother caring for my father; then watching over her as she negotiated life without him; finally, after my Ma died, I became Granny Rosie’s full-time “extra pair of hands”, as she puts it. Each act has been one of love, but it has also been tough and distressing. It is challenging, caring for those who once cared for you, managing the physical and sometimes mental life without a loss of dignity, the tiredness and the loss of privacy. And it is endless. Being a carer is about meeting someone else’s needs, every single day, at all hours. If you can’t be there all the time, it’s about finding someone who can — a neighbour, a relative, a friend.
Many people, finding the relentless struggle impossible, have to leave their jobs. A spike in the number of people giving up work to care for family members was reported last year — 84% of them women. Most carers talk about feeling guilty whatever they do — that terrible disappointment on a beloved father’s face when the visit is over too soon, the falsely bright goodbye from a mother who is refusing to give in. The feeling, when you are caring for someone with dementia, when they can’t even recognise your face anymore.
On top of the emotional challenges are the practical ones, the financial ones. How do you agree with siblings over whether an ageing parent needs a residential home or a paid carer? Where do you turn, when you can afford neither to leave your job nor pay someone to care for a beloved relative? When there is so little state support on offer?
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