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REFLECTION 1 - The Seven Year Glitch - A Caregiving Detour
32 Plays2 months ago
From time to time, I share a story that continues to shape how I think — not because the facts have changed, but because my perspective has. These reflections stand on their own, and they often sit behind the conversations you hear elsewhere on this podcast.
This REFLECTION is titled The Seven Year Glitch – A Caregiving Detour It’s about a long stretch of caregiving that revealed how easily we confuse planning and sacrifice with progress, and how clarity often arrives only after predictability breaks down
Host: Jess Villegas: ACUITY Business Consulting
Jess Email: jess@acuitybusiness.consulting
Jess LinkedIN - LInkedIN
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Transcript
Unchanged Facts, New Perspectives
00:00:05
Speaker
This is a reflection from the Leaders Commute podcast, and I'm Jess Villegas. From time to time, I share story that continues to shape how I think, not because the facts have changed, but because my perspective has.
00:00:17
Speaker
These reflections stand on their own, and they often sit behind the conversations you hear elsewhere on this podcast.
Caregiving and the Illusion of Progress
00:00:23
Speaker
This reflection is titled The Seven-Year Glitch. It's about a long stretch of caregiving that revealed how easily we confuse planning and sacrifice with progress and how clarity often arrives only after predictability breaks down.
00:00:38
Speaker
Please enjoy.
Geraldine's Arrival and Family Dynamics
00:00:45
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The night was emblematic of many of the nights that Leslie and I had experienced once we made the decision in 2017 to have Leslie's mother, my mother-in-law, Geraldine, live her remaining days in our northeast suburban Atlanta home.
00:00:59
Speaker
It was a night of too much unease and wakefulness, made worse by her having to manage the challenges of dementia.
Hospice Strategy vs. Dementia's Unpredictability
00:01:05
Speaker
Hospice, from my point of view, could most be characterized by an endless strain of frequent and intense strategizing, planning, and rationalizing every decision toward the facilitation of a rare good day and a comfortable and dignified end of life.
00:01:21
Speaker
But the anxiety constituent of a 95-year-old brain teeming with the progression of dementia turns eating and bathroom habits and days and nights upside down.
00:01:32
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President Eisenhower once said, plans are useless, but planning is essential. Intellectually, I appreciated the bigger lesson of resilience and adaptiveness while continually working on a plan to drive focus and energy.
00:01:46
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But this night especially was a plans are useless one, and a constant stress hung between Geraldine's extreme anxiousness and my guilt for considering how and when this whole situation would be over.
Managing Care and Home Transformation
00:01:59
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Between bouts of nodding off and other manifestations of sleep deprivation, Leslie and I proceeded to a post-mortem of that night's events. There was a standard checklist of questions.
00:02:10
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Did she sleep too much during the day? Was her meal, constructed for digestion as much as for taste, just a little too spicy? Last evening, did we draw the shades soon enough to mitigate the effects of sundowning, a phenomenon in dementia patients where confusion, agitation, anxiety, and behavioral changes worsen in the late afternoon and evening.
00:02:32
Speaker
The still too early and cold fall morning postponed the analysis until a more civilized time. Too tired to return to our bedroom, we established makeshift accommodations to stay close to Geraldine and then drifted to sleep.
Life Shifts and Abandoned Plans
00:02:47
Speaker
A reasonable portion of the space windfall we enjoyed upon relocating from California to Georgia 25 years earlier took the form of an 800 square foot unfinished basement and a perennially soon to be extra bedroom, game room, workout room, TV room, kids fun room, and sewing room.
00:03:04
Speaker
But as each season passed, the fluctuating purpose for the room could never line up with our timing and financing realities. So there it sat, accumulating objects of varying degrees of importance, all of waning functionality or value as each year passed.
00:03:20
Speaker
Finally, in the spring of 2017, We made the decision to clear everything out and finish the basement in order for 88-year-old Geraldine to come and live with us. By Christmas of that year, she was settled and acclimated in her new home.
00:03:35
Speaker
The year before, in 2016, after taking a cruise in the South Mediterranean that included time in some of the most beautiful places in Italy and Spain, Leslie and I vowed to make this a more common experience.
00:03:48
Speaker
Talk of France soon turned into planning and deposits for some future excursion that would have to be woven in between my still active and travel-laden professional life. But over subsequent months, the trip had to be canceled a couple of times as Geraldine's condition began to decline.
00:04:04
Speaker
The opportunity to take the trip never came, and major planning efforts reverted from European cruises to managing the logistics of selling Geraldine's home and relocating her into ours.
Finding Moments of Peace
00:04:15
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The approaching seven-year anniversary of this move...
00:04:18
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as with all of the prior anniversaries, were more calibrations than celebrations, marked by the design of coping strategies and searches for small moments of bliss.
00:04:30
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This day's moment of bliss, born reluctantly from the chaos of the night which had now moved into morning, became apparent as I sleepily resettled into a leather chair that was not as comfortable as it should have been.
00:04:42
Speaker
Leslie was breathing softly, her petite frame nestled in a love chair under some weighted blankets, The blue and gold flicker of the fireplace interplayed with the faint morning sunrise peering through the mostly drawn shades.
00:04:54
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The white noise of the furnace almost drowned out the early morning chirpings of the Carolina wrens bouncing around the backyard. Knowing the moment was fleeting, I rested whatever rejuvenation I could and longed for when we might replicate more of these moments.
Roles in Caregiving: Love and Duty
00:05:11
Speaker
I had assured Leslie that I was ready for Geraldine to move in with us, but at times my behavior belied my intent. Often, Leslie had to remind me that, however I chose to handle the circumstances, she had to be first and foremost a caregiver, with no options but to exercise compassion.
00:05:30
Speaker
Caregiver. The power in this word was always a jolt, a reminder that my relationship with Geraldine was secondary and not one that should add to Leslie's stress. Her independent and strong-willed nature exacerbated the mother-in-law, son-in-law dynamics already at play.
00:05:46
Speaker
But ultimately, my love and affection for Leslie made it a foregone conclusion that I would never be an obstacle when the time came to make this move. Also, my mother Rachel, who had passed away several years earlier, nailed the door shut to any other ideas I may have had on the subject.
00:06:04
Speaker
Once, upon asking me how things were going with Geraldine, And then hearing my tepid response of, you know, Jerry's Jerry, she remarked sternly, listen, mijo, if you love Leslie, you love her mother, and you should do for her what you would do for me.
00:06:20
Speaker
And that was that. The first couple of years went fairly well. A benefit I had not anticipated was the assuaging of my guilt for leaving Leslie for extended periods of time to work on consulting projects.
00:06:33
Speaker
Geraldine filled the roles of yard work partner, meals companion, and errands collaborator, roles of that it had been vacated by all my travels. But inevitably, Geraldine's decline imposed more demand on Leslie, and it became necessary for me to travel less and be more helpful around the house.
00:06:52
Speaker
I started doing more of the easier to manage house cleaning chores. I handled all of the grocery shopping, becoming more efficient with each trip. I took responsibility for all of the household administrative duties and small projects that to this point we had shared.
00:07:08
Speaker
But I believe Leslie most appreciated my taking responsibility for making all of our meals. Meal planning and preparation had become their own grind with trying to manage food preferences and appropriateness for each of our respective nutritional needs.
00:07:23
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Leslie would place hers and Geraldine's meal orders and hope that I could cook something edible. Over the years, I had communicated to Leslie that if I had the time, I believed I could become a reasonably good cook.
00:07:35
Speaker
My trips to the grocery store became my respite from the daily grind, and I started looking for ways to make healthier and more interesting meals. Leslie's encouragement of my efforts emboldened even more creativity, and soon I found that the cooking part of the day was the most enjoyable for me.
Pandemic's Impact on Life and Growth
00:07:53
Speaker
The arrival of COVID-19 in spring of 2020 coincided with the effective end of my work travel. The timing was fortuitous as I had just closed a consulting project for the sale of a business, which resulted in fewer work demands and more time to support Leslie.
00:08:08
Speaker
But she anticipated what I had not yet considered or was reluctant to acknowledge. That in spite of my good intentions to be helpful, the abrupt stop to a major portion of my work life would be difficult for me to navigate.
00:08:23
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Leslie had too often been the recipient of the grumpiness that would ensue when I felt deprived of my diversions, so she was supportive of the various activities in which I engaged to help me keep some sanity.
00:08:34
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For example, I was able to keep an exercise regimen transitioning from hikes and trail runs to long walks at a local park. Over many years, I considered how I might translate my consulting work and experience it into a book that could help small businesses.
00:08:48
Speaker
The rise of the podcast medium provided an alternative vehicle for this work, and I was able to develop a very satisfying format for distribution of my material. I purchased my first guitar ever and began taking guitar lessons, a luxury I could never rationalize over the years.
00:09:04
Speaker
I started catching up on an inventory of books that I had set aside for later, and I continued to expand my cooking skills by trying new recipes and ingredients and exploring other methods of cooking.
00:09:17
Speaker
One of the casualties of our circumstance was my love of browsing bookstores, having coffee and sharing a dessert with Leslie, talking about family and the things that we wanted to do when we finally had the time.
00:09:28
Speaker
Over the entirety of our long marriage, whether it was coffee and desserts or gathered around fire pits at the beach or quiet dinners at seaside restaurants or drinks at a sports bar, it was enormously calming for me to have this time with her.
00:09:43
Speaker
that allowed me to apologize for this or accept congratulations for that, or to worry about this or plan for that, or to check off this or update on that. A recent version of this found me and Leslie relaxing in Geraldine's space and as usual, recapping the events of the prior day.
Finding Balance and Embracing the Present
00:10:01
Speaker
We were enjoying coffee and whatever I might have concocted for breakfast. The absence of acute issues from the night before freed the conversation to flow easily. We even had time to talk about other subjects entirely.
00:10:14
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Leslie asked me how guitar lessons were going and then challenged my assertion that I had never owned a guitar because she remembered me strumming some tunes back when we were just out of high school. She admitted that she did not know much about the podcast and frankly did not see it coming once I started developing it.
00:10:30
Speaker
I explained this was the alternative to the book ideas I had casually mentioned over the years. She asked how my buddy Rick was coping not having me around for hiking and backpacking trips. I said he was managing, and I thanked her for letting me get my long daily walks in and that I was now averaging almost 30 miles a week.
00:10:47
Speaker
We considered what new recipe I might try for dinner, and she complimented me on how good all the meals tasted. We talked about many more things, but as we spoke, I came to realize that this day and the several weeks leading up to it seemed so much more manageable than they had ever been on this journey.
00:11:05
Speaker
There were several reasons that I might have cited for this, but as I tried to consider it more deeply, something surprising began to surface. When Geraldine was first admitted to hospice in 2024, I immediately moved into a hopeful mood, not for Geraldine's passing, but for the anticipated relief Leslie and I desperately needed.
00:11:26
Speaker
The prognosis for less than a year seemed to manageable against the six years that had already passed. Leslie had taken extraordinary measures to ensure her comfort, and I presumed this would translate into a peaceful drift towards the end.
00:11:41
Speaker
But Geraldine's considerable strength and resilience, skills honed her entire life to deal with more than her share of challenges and hardships, would accompany her even in this season.
00:11:53
Speaker
Her daily fight against the inevitable became a fight against us as well, and the struggle made each passing day interminably long. It also provoked a form of paralysis that, for me, consistently institutionalized the least positive view of the circumstances.
00:12:09
Speaker
I knew this was a problem because it disrespected the wonderful new relationship that I had developed with her, the joy experienced in seeing her and Leslie share tender moments, and the opportunity to create some tender moments of my own.
00:12:23
Speaker
The paralysis did not abate until I, and perhaps Leslie as well, realized that we had slowly and almost imperceptibly just stopped waiting.
00:12:36
Speaker
This simple shift in thinking did not come easily. It was forged from the small successes and big failures and constant strategizing and seemingly endless days and nights into feedback that was calling for a different motive and a way of being.
00:12:50
Speaker
A lyric by the singer-songwriter sean rowe states wisdom is lost in thet trees somewhere Sean Rowe states, It was time to stop hurrying ahead to a time when I thought, somehow, my life would be easier and better, and to appreciate what was in front of me.
Insights and Gratitude in Caregiving Journey
00:13:11
Speaker
Geraldine's final days presented rare moments of lucidity. Never quite sure if she recognized who I was, I always approached her with the politeness of a Boy Scout who was trying to help an elderly person cross the street.
00:13:23
Speaker
I asked, how are you doing today, Jerry? She at least saw me as someone safe because she gave me a nice smile and said, oh, hi Well, I am just flabbergasted.
00:13:35
Speaker
Leslie and I gave each other a where the hell did that come from smile, and then she continued, and I would like to know what your part is in all of this. As I assessed what the meaning was to this question so I could give the appropriate response, I recalled the contention by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor, who stated that meaning is not something we find in a general sense, but something we create through our actions and responses to the unique challenges life presents to us.
00:14:06
Speaker
Though I aspired to this state, Leslie had selflessly embodied every facet of this dynamic. But Geraldine had posed the question to me, and the best I could produce was, well, Jerry, I am just here to help.
00:14:20
Speaker
She just smiled again, sweetly and quietly. Geraldine was not a complainer. She was tough, she was stubborn, and she had more physical strength than any 95-year-old ever needed.
00:14:32
Speaker
She was defensive of family to a fault. She always crossed her legs and held her head high until tired bones and gravity finally won, but only barely. I did not understand most of this until I was reintroduced to her as a resident in our home.
00:14:48
Speaker
Though not the way I would have planned it, Geraldine's world provided the space for me to realize things I might not have ever done on my own. But most importantly, and I count this as her gift to me for helping to take care of her, it allowed Leslie and I to spend more time together and partner on an effort of supreme importance.
00:15:08
Speaker
Through most of the caretaking journey, it seemed rational to plan and sacrifice for whatever hardships were likely to come. But eventually, the predictability of it completely unraveled and produced something different, a type of unanticipated glitch that created a new awareness that could only be appreciated by looking at the entirety of the experience.
00:15:35
Speaker
What took me seven years to understand is this. The hardest part of that journey wasn't the caregiving, the exhaustion, or even the uncertainty. It was the waiting. I spent years believing that life was somehow paused until the hardship resolved, that once things returned to normal, meaning and momentum would resume.
00:15:53
Speaker
But what eventually became clear is that nothing was paused at all. The glitch wasn't the disruption. It was my assumption that life was supposed to follow a predictable sequence.
00:16:04
Speaker
But when we finally stopped waiting for relief, for resolution, for a different future, we didn't suddenly fix the system. We entered it fully. And that shift changed everything.
00:16:16
Speaker
In business, we do this all the time. We plan and forecast and commit to linear outcomes. Then, when something unexpected happens, such as a market shift, a leadership change, or a stalled initiative, we label it a failure or a delay.
00:16:32
Speaker
But what if those moments aren't breakdowns at all? What if they're signals that the system is recalibrating or that something new is emerging if we're willing to stop forcing the old plan?
00:16:43
Speaker
When leaders stop waiting for conditions to improve and instead engage fully with what is, they gain access to better decisions, deeper partnerships, and more resilient outcomes.
00:16:55
Speaker
My caregiving experience didn't delay life. It revealed it. In that sense, the glitch wasn't an interruption. It was a message.
00:17:06
Speaker
This has been a reflection from the Leaders Commute podcast, and I'm Jess Villegas. Thank you for listening and for your thoughtful engagement.