Caregiving 101: Forgetting Joy

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

My father died in 2013, leaving as his legacy his widow, my mother, for me to care for. I have been doing that for nearly a decade now — but for a lot of that time I had been bolstered by the presence of my husband, who was a staunch support and a harbor, but when he too died in 2021 I was left to soldier on with my mother on my own — and she has been steadily deteriorating, particularly since her small stroke in January of 2020. This…