Caregiving Quotes

“Affirmations are our mental vitamins, providing the supplementary positive thoughts we need to balance the barrage of negative events and thoughts we experience daily.”
― Tia Walker, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“Intuition is a wonderful gift but it can be both a blessing and a curse. If you can easily tune in to the grief of another, it is very easy to lose your way if you have not yet resolved your own present or past trauma and grief. If you have not healed from your own grief and you turn around and give all you have to give, you will find yourself drowning. Soon there will be nothing left of you.”
― Kate McGahan, Only Gone From Your Sight: Jack McAfghan's Little Therapy Guide to Pet Loss and Grief

“People tell you to keep your "courage" up. But the time for courage is when she was sick, when I took care of her and saw her suffering, her sadness, and when I had to conceal my tears. Constantly one had to make a decision, put on a mask and that was courage.

--Now, courage means the will to live and there's all too much of that.”
― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979

“There were moments when it hurt so bad you couldn’t breathe, yet somehow you survived the pain. There were days when you could barely put one foot in front of the other, yet somehow you arrived at your destination. There were nights when you cried yourself to sleep, yet somehow you held on until the morning. Your life is nothing less than a miracle.”
― Eleanor Brownn

“I will be the first one to greet you, Welcome back.
Even if I know you’d rather go.”
― Romalyn Ante

“If you need to reach me, or send me anything I'll hopefully have access to email, but who knows how alert I'll be...Please don't ask too many questions about what the logistics look like, or where and when I'll be where and when- we just don't know that right now and will not for a little while. FOR INSTANCE:

Good message: Wish Max well! No need to reply!

Bad message: When is Max going to the bathroom, and in what city -- I'd like to bring my schnauzer to visit him; he's a good luck healing massage schnauzer from Ireland. Is Max going to die? How often will Max die? Can he attend my event in four months?

I love all of you very much, and am extremely grateful for your support.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“It was exhausting and it took fifteen minutes. Fifteen for a pit stop that should take two! She knew she shouldn't whine; there were so many "bigger" things to deal with. But it was these everyday indignities, these small chunks of lost minutes, that got her the most, made her think how "normal" parents had no idea how good they had it. Oh, sure - moms of infants got a taste of this, but anything was bearable when it was temporary; try doing it day after day, knowing you'd do this until you died, that you'd be fricking squatting in a van peeing into a jar when you were eighty, driving around your fifty-year-old invalid daughter to God knows what therapies they'd have by then, worrying who'd take over when you died.”
― Angie Kim

“Put one foot in front of the other, no matter what. Enjoy the hilltop views, have courage in the valleys, pay attention to the bends in the road, cry when you have to, laugh when you can, be helpful to others, share your joys as well as your sorrows, and remember that God created you for a purpose.”
― Eleanor Brownn

“I didn't want my exhaustion to burn through my empathy. How terrifying was this loss of electric power superimposed on the powerlessness of aging and disability? I could not fathom it and tried not to be judgmental about my parents' reactions. How did it feel not seeing well to begin with and then functioning by flashlight? How did it feel to depend on others for your heat, water, and food?”
― Patricia Williams, While They're Still Here: A Memoir

“I never really wanted to be a professional; all I knew was that I wanted whatever I did to matter. I believe writing matters, of course, but nothing has ever felt more real to me than the work of caring. That energy and effort to maintain—ourselves, our loved ones, our community—has always felt substantial, true, visceral, and, yes, real to me. I don’t believe care work has to wreck us. This labor can be shared, social, collective—and transformative.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“For me as a spouse of a husband who is sexually competent, this is a big issue for me. Not because I desire sex, but because he does.
He has become like a child in many ways. Yet, even as his abilities and personality diminish, he still wants us to act like we always have as husband and wife.”
― Susan Straley, Alzheimer's Trippin' with George: Diagnosis to Discovery in 10,000 Miles

“Rosa's death would have destroyed her, demolished her life. But she would have had the luxury of finality, of lowering the coffin and saying goodbye. And eventually, she'd have risen and rebuilt her life. This way, she was left standing, but in a purgatory state of descent, being whittled away, bit by bit, day by day. Was that better? "What mother thinks this way?" Teresa said.”
― Angie Kim

“They wheeled my father up. "Hi Dad," I touched his hand, which was locked down under a thick restraining belt. His sweat pants were stained with food; the socks on his feet were twisted and wrong. "We'll meet you inside," I yelled. My father craned his neck and answered: "Two. Four. Seventeen."
The New York Times Magazine, LIVES”
― Lisa K Friedman

“It's not a matter of whether or not every employer will feel the impact of caregiving/work balance conflicts, it's a matter of how effectively each employer deals with those conflicts.”
― John Paul Marosy, Caregivers Work: A Six Step Guide to Balancing Work and Family: Elder Care Edition

“I envy Pip the time she spends with Dylan, but at the same time, I don't know if I could do it. Time away from the hospital gives me strength for when I come back. Eating proper food fuels me for when I don't eat at all. Seeing healthy, happy people around me reminds me that's the life we once had. The life we'll have again.”
― Clare Mackintosh, After the End

“Be careful, some criminals have taken ads in local papers offering home care services at reduced rates-WHAT YOU MUST KNOW AND DO BEFORE SELECTING A CAREGIVER FOR YOUR PARENTS OR CHILDS SAFETY, Author, V J SMITH BARNES AND NOBLE NOOK BOOK”
― V J Smith, MY YUMMY SEAFOOD RECIPES INSPIRED BY THE SEA

“Because the thing about a boy like Oz is no matter how much you love him, you also hate what he does to your life, the way he sucks the energy from it and uses up all the air, so relentless and demanding it's like sometimes you can't breathe.”
― Suzanne Redfearn, In an Instant

“Because the thing about a boy like Oz is no matter how much you love him, you also hate what he does to your life, the way he sucks the energy from it and uses up all the air, so relentless and demanding it's like sometimes you can't breathe. None of us admitted it when he was alive, but we all felt it.”
― Suzanne Redfearn, In an Instant

“And just as this illness changed his life, and hers, and Claudette's and their house on rue de l'Agneau, so it changed that old, cracked globe. It felt different in her hands--smaller. She'd hold it like an egg that could break under her touch. Because now Jeanne's mind could not be on future of foreign countries, it had to be on the cutting up of food, the emptying of chamber pots. Her life moved around her father, and loving him more closely--and how could she resent this?”
― Susan Fletcher

“Todas las familias son diferentes, pero me he fijado en que, en muchas ocasiones, detrás de cada exhausta mujer madura cargada de responsabilidades que se ocupa de sus padres cuando envejecen suele haber un par de hermanos varones que no tiran del carro. Supongo que no educamos a los hombres para que acudan al rescate cuando surge una crisis familiar.”
― Caitlin Moran, More Than a Woman

“Here’s the thing with photos of people you’ve lost. They become coloured by a melancholic tint — it’s as if all those joyful moments were lies. As if the happiness of the captured memories were some sort of illusion.”
― Mitchell Consky, Home Safe: A Memoir of End-of-Life Care During Covid-19

“Sex differences are also apparent at the level of narrower ability facets. For instance, women outperform men in memory for object location -likely as a result of selection for gathering skills- and tend to use different strategies for spatial navigation and wayfinding. Another major axis of sexual differentiation is that of mechanistic versus mentalistic cognition. In general, females perform better in mentalistic tasks as decoding nonverbal behavior, interpreting emotional expressions, and attributing beliefs and other states of mind. This advantage in mentalizing -especially in one-to-one and small-group interactions- is likely due to the higher demands posed by the complexity of female competition, and women's primary role in caregiving.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Sip a cup of tea slowly
and slide into a sleep
that carries you
back to those softer days
when I cradled you
in the curves of
my consistency.”
― Jenny Noble Anderson, But Still She Flies: Poems and Paintings

“The significance of living longer is the caregiving never ends.”
― Joy Loverde, The Complete Eldercare Planner, Revised and Updated 4th Edition: Where to Start, Which Questions to Ask, and How to Find Help

“you don't need to heal others to heal yourself, you can just heal yourself. you do not need to give love to others to love yourself, you can just love yourself.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“I gave my mother her first bubble bath in years, but she passed out in the tub. Great, I try to do a good thing and I kill my mom. At least she smelled good.”
― Mark Steven Porro, A Cup of Tea on the Commode: My Multi-Tasking Adventures of Caring for Mom. And How I Survived to Tell the Tale

“One day she asked, 'Why do you treat me so well?' 'Because you're my mother and you deserve to be treated like a queen.' After finishing her tea she burped. 'But queens don't do that." She smiled and said, 'How do you know?”
― Mark Steven Porro, A Cup of Tea on the Commode: My Multi-Tasking Adventures of Caring for Mom. And How I Survived to Tell the Tale

“One day she asked, 'Why do you treat me so well?' 'Because you're my mother and you deserve to be treated like a queen.' After finishing her tea she burped. 'But queens don't do that.' She smiled and said, 'How do you know?”
― Mark Steven Porro, A Cup of Tea on the Commode: My Multi-Tasking Adventures of Caring for Mom. And How I Survived to Tell the Tale

“Neither of my parents swore. When Mom got mad, she’d say, “Nincompoop, I’m fed up,” or if absolutely furious, “I’m so angry I could spit.” When Dad got angry, it seemed like food came to mind. He said things like “Chowderhead,” “You’re full of soup,” or he replaced “hell” with his favorite meat: “Get the ham out of here.”
― Mark Steven Porro, A Cup of Tea on the Commode: My Multi-Tasking Adventures of Caring for Mom. And How I Survived to Tell the Tale

“Somehow the conversation drifted to G-string bathing suits (or as I call them, “anal floss”). We talked about their popularity and who would—or who should not—be jumping on that fashion bandwagon. Mom was completely in the dark. “What’s a G-string?” she asked.
The girls described them in detail.
“G-string,” Mom replied. “I’d need two Gs.”
― Mark Steven Porro, A Cup of Tea on the Commode: My Multi-Tasking Adventures of Caring for Mom. And How I Survived to Tell the Tale