| Isolation and exhaustion can be a recipe for disaster… |
I used to practice law. As a solo practitioner, I sometimes ended up offering services the big firms didn’t, such as house calls. A client I’ll call Mrs. Smith heard about the house calls and contacted me when she wanted make a new will. She was, as she told me, “housebound.” We talked on the telephone a couple of times to work through what the will would say, and when the document was ready, I drove out to her house so that she could sign it. I had seen rural poverty before, and I didn’t expect any surprises.
Mrs. Smith lived a mile or two down a dirt road that branched from a numbered state route. When I rounded the last turn and saw her house, it seemed to be about what I had expected. The first hint of surprise came when I knocked on the door. The woman who let me into the house identified herself only as “Linda.”
Linda motioned for me to come in, but her gaze seemed to go right through me. She had what in the military we used to call the “thousand yard stare.” This is the look combat veterans got when stress and exhaustion had driven them to the brink. In Linda’s case, I think the look came from extreme, even dangerous, caregiver fatigue. As far as I could tell, Linda had no help in caring for Mrs. Smith and no relief from the round-the-clock demands of her situation. Things were only made worse by the poverty in which Linda and Mrs. Smith lived.
In those days, I had had no experience as a caregiver myself, so I didn’t really appreciate how explosive a situation like this could become. A person with the look I saw in Linda’s eyes might be capable of anything. To make matters worse, Mrs. Smith was a difficult and demanding person. I was ready to get away from her after about half an hour, the time it took us to execute the will.
Linda was alone with the woman, and responsible for her wellbeing, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That little house was an incubator for elder abuse if ever there was one. If I ever see that look in a caregiver’s eyes again, I swear I will intervene. Elders do not deserve to be abused, and caregivers do not deserve to be driven to the edge of insanity.
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There are 2 Responses to “The Caregiver with the Thousand Yard Stare”
#2 Caregivers Will Miss “Time Goes By” - Caregiving Blog - 04 December, 12:57 PM
[…] This, by the way, is not just another Boomer rant. It is a sad and dangerous truth that many, many caregivers work in isolation. This is, I believe, not because they are caregivers, but because as Americans 55 and older they […]
#1 Joyangel - 28 November, 12:01 AM
Hallelujah! All you caregivers out there, please after reading this, ask for help from other family members, to get a day or two off to be by yourself. You may love the person you’re caring for deeply, but that does not mean that you don’t need time for yourself! Sometimes people want to help; they just don’t quite know how.