My siblings and I took turns caring for our mother when she underwent cancer treatment. A year earlier, we did the same thing when our father went through heart surgery. Next door to me, a daughter came home from New York City to help her mother care for her dying father. Two doors down, the daughter of an elderly couple helped care for her parents. They recently died within three weeks of one another. Another friend just lost both his parents within a few months of one another, and his father-in-law is also ill. He has faced enormous care giving demands.

This litany of family stories ripples out. Is this something besides a string of coincidences and a run of very bad luck?

It is simply life, taking its course. And for baby boomers and their elderly parents, it is a huge demographic certainty. A CARP report on Home Care in Canada includes a graph charting the growth of the senior population, age 65 and over. The line travels up in a steep angle.

Growing senior population

According to the 2006 Census, the number of Canadians aged 65 and over increased by more than 11 per cent, topping the 4 million mark for the first time. This has profound implications for the rest of the population, especially the group in the middle years who face caring or arranging care for aging relatives and friends.

The stress is considerable, according to a recent report called A Guide to end-of-life care for seniors. According to the guide, “29 per cent of caregivers of persons with long-term health problems stated that caregiving had altered their sleep patterns and 21 per cent claimed their health had been altered.”

Gerry Smith is a counselling specialist with the EAP firm, Warren Shepell. He says that caregivers experience a confluence of physical exhaustion, emotional overload and intellectual frustration-the latter because they can’t do much about the progress of aging or serious illness. His company provides the employee assistance programs for many Canadian companies.

“We run a program called Family Matters. We have more and more requests coming in from people who are in that supportive position of being caregivers. I know a number of my colleagues dealing with elderly parents, some of who have Alzheimer’s, and who do need to give care and attention to their parents and find it very frustrating that work still has to be done. You still have to earn your living. You still have to make your own way in life,’ he says.

Emotional drain hardest?
Smith says in his experience, it’s the emotional drain which is hardest on caregivers.