Should I care for my ageing parent myself?

A student once asked me about filial piety, and I said that nowadays people think it means being able to feed your parents. But even dogs and horses are fed. Without reverence, where is the difference?nnAnother asked, and I said: the difficult part is the expression on your face. To take on the heavy work when there is work to be done, to set out food and drink for them, is that enough? It is easy to do these things with a face that says you resent them. It is hard to do them gently.nnSo I would ask you to separate two questions that are usually tangled. The first is who will do the physical work of care: the washing, the meals, the nights, the appointments. Sometimes you are the best person. Sometimes you are not, and others, trained and rested, can do it better than you can while also working and raising children. There is no shame in that.nnThe second question is who will give the respect, the company, the patience, the sense that your parent is still honoured and not merely managed. That cannot be handed to anyone else. It is yours.nnIf caring for them yourself would wear you down until you could only do it with a resentful face, you may honour them more by arranging good care and visiting often, gently, with time to listen. Know your parents' age, I once said. It is a cause for joy and for fear. Let both shape what you do.

When my mother was dying, my sister and I took turns at her bedside in the clinic for weeks. I wrote a short book about it afterwards. I was surprised by how much I felt, for a woman with whom I had quarrelled most of my life, and surprised by how much of what was done to her was done for the comfort of others rather than for hers.nnLater I wrote a long book on old age, and what I found was a scandal. Society, which values people for what they produce, quietly discards those who no longer produce. The old are hidden away, spoken over, treated as objects to be stored rather than as people with a present and a will. Families take part in this without meaning to.nnSo my first advice is: do not decide this for your parent if they can still decide. Ask them. Listen to what they fear and what they want, even if it is inconvenient. They are still a free person, however frail.nnMy second is that you are a free person too. The idea that a good daughter, and it is usually a daughter, must give up her work and her life to nurse a parent is a convention, not a law of nature. You may choose it, freely, and find meaning in it. You may choose otherwise, and arrange care that you can bear to watch. What you should not do is drift into it out of guilt, and then resent the person you are caring for.

I once wrote that the love of our neighbour, in all its fullness, simply means being able to say to them: what are you going through? And being able to hear the answer. That sounds easy. It is almost impossible. Most of the time, when we are with someone who is suffering, we are thinking about ourselves, our tiredness, our discomfort, what we must do next, how to make the suffering stop so that we can stop watching it.nnAttention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It means emptying yourself for a while so that the other person can be fully present to you, as they really are, not as your fear or your duty paints them.nnAn ageing parent often needs many practical things, and those things can be done by many hands. But what they rarely receive, and need most, is to be looked at and listened to by someone who loves them, without hurry. That is the part of their care that no one else can give in your place.nnSo do not measure your love by the number of hours of physical labour you perform. You can exhaust yourself with tasks and never once give your parent your attention. Equally, you can arrange for others to do the tasks and then come, rested, and sit with them, and give them the one thing they are starving for.nnWhatever arrangement you choose, guard that. It is the heart of the matter.