Your Care

(Each month, we take a closer look at an aspect of your caregiving experience. In August, our focus is finding the hidden blessings in your caregiving experience.)

Hidden Blessings

What you’ve gained—without even realizing

By Denise M. Brown, Editor and Publisher

A few years ago, the Chicago Sun-Times featured a two-part series on sun downing, an experience of intense anxiety that persons with Alzheimer's Disease or a related dementia often have during the late afternoon hours. In the series, a reporter followed a family caregiver, a daughter, as she struggled to lessen her mother's sun downing experiences.

In the second part of the series, the daughter openly discussed her relationship with her mother before the diagnosis--a relationship that had lacked the warmth and closeness that the daughter had hoped for. Now, however, she and her mother are closer than they ever have been and share moments of joy and love. These are moments that they had not known for sixty-some years.

This is a hidden blessing of caregiving--those unexpected, yet moving, moments or experiences that result. As caregivers, you know all too well about the curses of caregiving--the long hours, the struggles to find help and support, the sadness that chronic illness or debilitating disease brings for you and your care recipient. But, in this Special Focus, we put those curses in the background and focus on the blessings. These blessings are what make your caregiving experience. Sometimes, though, these blessings just need a little push to surface. And, that's what we do this month: Help you find your hidden blessings. They are there--for each and every one of you.

Index of Articles:

Finding the positives when only negatives seem to call

Finding my art within

What are your hidden blessings?