“I remember one day, the hospice worker came in and said to me, ‘You need some help!’ I just needed to talk with somebody and get a 24-hour break.” “Most hospice providers have social workers and that’s really great,” she said. To cope, she suggests family caregivers find someone – a friend, a neighbor, a pastor – to listen.

“Then there are bad days when physical scary things happen and you’re by yourself and you’re like, ‘I can’t deal with this!’” “There are good days and you go to the movies together and think, ‘Aren’t I lucky?’” she said. What can be very difficult one day can be much easier the next. “The advice to my mother might have been to rest and not wear herself out, but what difference does it make now?”įor caregivers, each day is different. “The person you are caring for, when they feel up to something, just do it,” she said. She recommends other people in her situation say goodbye to schedules and hello to living in the moment. “If we had been our organized and practical selves and stuck to a schedule, we would have missed out on one of the loveliest days she had left.”

“It was such a joyful 15 minutes,” she said.

Kelly’s mother only had enough energy for 15 minutes of this frivolity. “My sister and I helped her out on the deck, and it was a beautiful May morning, and we had martinis.” “One day, really towards the end of my mother’s life – for the most part she just slept – she got up and said, ‘I feel great! Let’s have a martini on the deck!’” Kelly recalled with a laugh and noting it was 9:30 a.m. Some of the tips in Kelly’s book are humorous, others are sad, and many are practical – just like the reality of being there for someone facing the end. One of six siblings, Kelly was the only one with a schedule flexible enough to allow her to move in with her mother to provide her elderly home care. Kelly became her mother’s primary caregiver in the final months of her mother’s life as she succumbed to cancer. “It’s OK to feel like, ‘I wish this person would just hurry up and die,’” said Lois Kelly, author of Be The Noodle: Fifty Ways to Be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver. Caregivers tasked with spending the final days, weeks, or months with a loved one with a terminal illness cope with many conflicting emotions.

Be the Noddle by Lois Kelly