The Angry Caregiver

 

I saw this letter writing campaign on my Facebook feed today and I thought immediately about adapting something similar to work to implement system change to support unpaid family caregivers. https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/take-action/support-kwakiutl Let's use this method to set up a system for letter writing on behalf of unpaid family caregivers. If we don't speak for ourselves, our voices will not be heard.  There is a labyrinth of government, non-government and for-profit organizational entities whose livelihood depends on the work of unpaid family caregivers. In the meantime, unpaid family caregivers remain invisible in terms of accountability, accurate cost assessment (financial, mental, emotional, physical), appropriate support mechanisms and impactful, pressure-relieving support. We will need a list of provincial and federal elected representatives to receive these letters. We will need their addresses - snail mail and email. Our strategy could be to send our lette...

  We didn’t plan to become unpaid family caregivers. Forty-five years ago, as we plotted our careers for early retirement, we didn’t factor in taking care of our 92 year old, mentally ill, developing dementia, end stage COPD, arthritically disabled mother. We may not have had concrete plans at that stage of our lives, and we also did not know what caregiving was, what it meant to be a family caregiver, or what it meant to be an unpaid family caregiver. This is family life. This is the life of a family over decades. This is the end of a long life that waited many years to come home from the mental health group home system. We thought we were prepared for Mom to come home. We tore out the bathtub and installed a no barrier shower. We emptied out our basement suite and set up a new bedroom for Mom and a guest room for unpaid family to come and stay with Mom. We knew that Mom could not be left unattended for any extended length of time. We knew that Mom was too frail to continue living...