The holidays are over and it’s a New Year! What does that mean to you? It can be a chance to realign, reassess, and rethink or perhaps none of these things. For me the New Year is a time to break old habits, to readjust, time to reflect on what worked for me this past year and what didn’t work. We all have our ways of attempting change and it seems like a lot of “doing” ; going to the gym, eating more healthy foods, making new goals, being more successful. On one level it’s easy to forget the “being” part of human being, and we’d be more realistic calling ourselves human-doing.

As a boomer caring for elderly parents or relatives, how can this month’s title, “Presents to Presence” shift one’s perspective? When we’re truly “being” we’re always in the present moment.  I learned an important lesson while spending time with our aunt in her 90s with Alzheimer’s. She wouldn’t remember when we visited her and probably felt we never came. What I eventually learned was that it didn’t really matter if she knew we visited with her yesterday, or last week. What mattered most was the love and sometimes laughter of those visits created snippets of precious time, which added to her life experience.

Our discovery was we were giving her our presence which was life affirming for the time we were together. On a side note, when we brought our two small dogs for a visit, at times she would ask every 45 seconds if they were related. It was hard not to explain the details of the story, and learned to simply answer the question and she was content for that moment.

Our biggest challenge was not to constantly wish our loved one was the way she used to be. It takes a lot of courage to weather the storm of Alzheimer’s. We realized our judgment of the awfulness of the disease was limiting us from being “present” with her.

One of my professors in graduate school said after a certain point the person with Alzheimer’s is not suffering as much as the family members. They don’t know that they don’t know. If someone tells a joke or a story for the 100th time, the person with Alzheimer’s often responds to it as if it was the first time they heard it.

The best gift we can give our elderly loved ones is our total presence when we are with them. What a precious thing. We can even extend that gift to our partner, kids or grandkids. It’s something that money can’t buy! 

Happy New Year!

Much gratitude for all you do in the lives of your elderly loved ones.

Susan Riley, M. Ed