There is no experience more grueling than constant combat. People are different, but there is a limit to how long you can be in action before you start to disintegrate psychologically. For young officers and pilots, this is about six months. It was discovered that most could recover sufficiently to return to service if they went on leave or a training course. Even better, if you knew that leave or a gap in combat was a certainty in your future, you could hold on.
Caregiving is the same. Without respite and the certain hope of respite, caregivers can crumble.
Alec lived with Anna for 11 terrible years. In many ways, my father repeated his parent’s marriage. He, too, lived, for a decade, with my mother who had lost control of her life. As my uncle had begged his father to leave Anna, I later begged my father to leave my mother. Both men could not do that. Their sense of honour would not allow them that choice. To them, death was the only way out.
If Alec and my father had some respite or hope of respite, they might not have reached that point where only death offered them their only hope of release. As a start, they might have had a rest. With the solace of such a rest, they might have then discovered that they had other choices.
Such a break might not have saved my granny or my mother, but it may have saved Alec and my father, and it certainly would have saved the family much agony.
If you are hanging on as a caregiver of a person with mental illness and addictions, Dunham House can offer you respite, which is the beginning of hope, and so maybe your life.
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