2,944 Text Messages
What I never expected from caring for my parents
2,944 texts. That’s what three years of caregiving looks like on a phone.
I didn’t realize that’s what I was signing up for when Lori first showed up at my parents’ house, just a few hours a day, three times a week, so my dad could have a break from being my mom’s main caregiver. Simple enough.
The early texts were almost charming in their ordinariness: my mom’s favorite grocery store, the park she liked to walk through, the types of sandwiches my parents preferred. A gentle introduction to two people, the rhythms of their lives and a picture of their needs.
I didn’t yet understand how quickly “simple” would unravel.
My mom had Alzheimer’s, and Lori began as her companion- chatty, fun, someone to take her on small excursions to the library, the grocery store, a nearby town to window shop. It gave my mom social interaction and time away from my increasingly crabby dad. It gave my dad the freedom to leave the house. (What I didn’t know was that he’d already been leaving for hours at a time, my mom alone at home with her Alzheimer’s confusion. I just hadn’t been physically close enough to pay close enough attention.)
Within months, the texts shifted. Lori had discovered my mom wasn’t showering. The sheets were soiled and going days without being changed. Her walk had taken on the slow, cautious shuffle that comes with dementia.
What started as companion care quietly became something else entirely.
We brought in a second caregiver, Ruth- sweet, patient, with a higher tolerance for my dad’s difficult moods. Together, Lori and Ruth stitched together a new version of normal: someone with my parents from 8am to 8pm every day, so they could continue living “independently,” aging in place, in the home they’d shared for decades.
My dad, meanwhile, gave everyone a run for their money.
Get Rachel Auth’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
“FYI. Dad sips DayQuil like he’s doing shots. Bottle above the fridge. Says it’s liquid aspirin.”
By year two, it was clear my dad’s mind was also slipping, though his version of the disease looked nothing like my mom’s gentle fade. Where she had become less anxious, more social, more present in small moments, he became volatile. He stopped opening the mail, forgot to pay bills, refused to change his clothes or shave. He drank more. He stopped taking his psychiatric medications. He would fly off the handle at the slightest provocation:
“Dads having some moments. His hair is sticking up. Mom commented so he poured his coffee over his head to flatten down. Luckily not hot. Now he’s cleaning up the mess. Oy vey. He emptied the linen closet the other day into your old room. Just a heads up” .
And he had decided, in the particular logic of his dementia, that I was the enemy.
I was plotting against him, he told Lori. Stealing from the house. Wasting his money. My husband, my family, my character, my choices- all of it fair game for his daily rants. And all of it documented, in real time, in texts flying from Lori’s phone to mine and back again.
“Good morning. Wednesday update. Arrived to find dad stumbling out of the workshop. He went to the diner. Had breakfast then came back for drinks… He thinks you all want his money and you’re selling his valuables for pennies…. FYI. He turned the water off in the kitchen.”
A small screen. Enormous hurt.
2,944 texts.
I never expected to have this kind of relationship with a caregiver. I never expected caregiving to look like this at all , not a single dramatic moment but a slow accumulation, message by message, of two lives changing in ways I couldn’t stop and could barely keep up with.
What I learned in my relationship with Lori is that hiring a caregiver was not just about employing someone to look after the day-to-day necessities and needs of my parents, but it was about having the right person to stand in the rooms I couldn’t be in, witness the things I needed to know, and communicate it all to me with humor and compassion.
That’s worth more than I can say.
