When Elder Care Brings Back Sibling Tensions
When my mother's health was failing, I was the "bad" sister who lived far away and wasn't involved. My sister helped my parents. She never asked me to do anything, and I didn't volunteer. I was widowed, raising kids and working, but that wasn't really why I kept to weekly calls and short, infrequent visits. I was stuck in my adolescent role as the aloof achiever, defending myself from my judgmental mother and other family craziness. As always, I deflected my sister's digs about my not being around more — and I didn't hear her rising desperation. It wasn't until my mom's funeral, watching my dad and sister cling to each other and weep, that I got a hint of their long ordeal — and how badly I'd screwed up.
My sister was so furious, she barely spoke to me during my father's last years. Honest, I'm not a terrible person. So how did I get it so wrong?
We hear a lot about the costs of taking care of our graying population. But the big story roiling beneath the surface is the psychological crisis among middle-aged siblings who are fuming or fighting over issues involving their aging parents. According to a new survey by the AARP- and MetLife-funded National Alliance for Caregiving, an estimated 43.5 million adults in the U.S. are looking after an older relative or friend. Of these, 43% said they did not feel they had a choice in this role. And although 7 in 10 said another unpaid caregiver had provided help in the past year, only 1 in 10 said the burden was split equally.
As siblings who are often separated geographically and emotionally, we are having to come together to decide such thorny issues as where Mom and Dad should live and where they should be buried. "It's like being put down with your siblings in the center of a nuclear reactor and being told, 'Figure it out,' " says University of Colorado geropsychologist Sara Honn Qualls.
Eldercare and end-of-life debates often hit families after decades of negotiating nothing more serious than where to spend Thanksgiving. We can be grownups with successful careers and kids of our own, yet all the old stuff ambushes us: sibling rivalry, entrenched roles and resentments, the way our family talked or didn't talk about important things.
One two-year study of married women caring for parents with dementia found that siblings were not only the greatest source of help to these caregivers but also the biggest source of interpersonal stress.
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