Neither Married Nor Single by David Kirkpatrick

Author:David Kirkpatrick [Kirkpatrick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brush Education

These same researchers found that the caregiver’s grief may overlap with depression. This is especially true when the caregiving role comes right on the heels of a previously complicated partnership with unresolved conflicts, mixed feelings, ambivalence, communication difficulties, emotional or physical abuse, or other important yet unresolved issues between the partners. In such cases, the challenge for the caregiving wife is especially acute and the results can be even more detrimental for the caregiver. Dr. Diana B. Denholm, the psychotherapist who wrote The Caregiving Wife’s Handbook after overseeing her own husband’s nightmarish trip through eleven and a half years of multiple illnesses, learned from the wives she interviewed that husbands who were abusive when they were healthy could become veritable tyrants when seriously or terminally ill.

The Alzheimer Society of Canada has prepared a detailed paper on what it terms the “ambiguous loss” that is experienced by most caregivers. This term means loving someone who is there physically, but not present in most other ways, someone who is disappearing in front of our eyes. So what does the caregiver experience in this complicated thing called ambiguous loss? One important aspect of it may be the loss of dreams and unfulfilled expectations in the shared present and the previously fantasized future. In my experience, however, one of the largest and earliest losses I experienced, which occurred soon after Clair’s diagnosis, was the disappearance of the shared, communicative partnership that I call mutuality. This is that sense that you’re on the same page as your partner nine times out of ten. Fighting. Laughing. Making up. There’s almost always an agreement to disagree, an understanding that you’re with each other (even when briefly you’re not with each other) physically, emotionally and psychologically.

The Alzheimer Society of Canada website also makes a useful distinction between instrumental grievers and intuitive grievers. Instrumental grievers are more comfortable “behaving” their grief, for example, vigorously looking after their loved ones, immersing themselves in projects and services for their living partners, then perhaps busying themselves with memorials for their lost ones. Intuitive grievers, on the other hand, feel their grief, often with a wide range of emotions including, but not limited to, sadness, frustration, anger and loneliness. Like most psychological distinctions and differences, of course, there is often an overlap between these two grieving styles within one grieving person.

Ambiguous loss also includes anticipatory grief, letting both the figurative and the actual tears fall before the final loss. With AD, this kind of loss is usually much more prolonged and much more ambiguous than with a partner facing a finite, concrete, major chronic or acute illness with better known, sharper boundaries, both in time and function. As a result, many caregivers of spouses with AD may not receive the acknowledgement or support for their grief that they expect from their families and friends because family and friends don’t always realize that the caregiver is grieving. On the other hand, because most AD caregivers are aware that the closure of death may be

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