Short answer: You cannot stop noticing the losses, and you should not try. What you can do is keep a second record. Once a day, write down one specific thing your parent still did, in her own words or with her own hands. Loss announces itself. What remains has to be looked for on purpose.
The form at the neurologist’s office has twelve lines on it. Can she bathe without help. Can she handle her own money. Can she be left alone for two hours. You go down the page with the pen and you check no, and no, and no, and then one maybe that you feel bad about writing. In the car afterward you cannot stop seeing it. Twelve lines, and you filled all twelve of them in as subtraction.
How do you stop focusing on what your parent has lost?
Seneca was a Roman writer who spent his last years sending long letters to a younger friend. In one of them he goes back to a country house he had owned since boyhood and finds the buildings crumbling, the trees bare, and a worn out old man at the door who turns out to be a childhood playmate.
“Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.”
He wrote that on a day when everything he looked at was falling apart.
Why this hits differently when you are a caregiver
Most people who hear “look at what you still have” have not spent the week watching a person get smaller. You have. And you have been asked to write it down.
This is the part almost nobody says out loud. Your job actually requires you to track the decline. The doctor asks what has changed since last time. The home care agency sends an assessment that is nothing but a list of things she fails at. The whole system runs on loss, and you are the one who reports it.
So you got good at counting. That is you being the person who gets her the help.
The trouble is that the counting does not stop when the form is done. She asks the same question a fourth time and some part of your brain files it. She uses the walker to cross a room she used to cross in three steps and you note that too. You are with her and missing her at the same time, in the same room, on the same afternoon.
Seneca is not telling you old age is lovely. Look at what he was standing in front of. He is saying something narrower and more useful. There is still something there, and most people walk past it because they arrived already knowing what they were going to find.
What is still there in your mother is not a consolation prize. It is her. She still says thank you to the aide every single time. She still hums when the radio is on. Those are facts, the same kind of facts as the twelve lines on the form.
You are not being asked to feel better about any of this. You are being asked to keep an honest ledger. Right now yours only has one column.
One thing you can do today
Start a Still List.
Take an index card and put it somewhere you stand every day. The inside of a cabinet door. The back of the medication organizer. Your phone’s notes app works too.
Tonight, write down one thing she still did today. Not one thing she used to do. Not one thing she managed with help. One thing you watched happen.
Make it small and specific. Not “she was in a good mood.” Instead: she hummed along with the radio while I made her eggs. She knew it was Thursday. She patted the dog three times and called him buddy. Date it. One line. Four is too many. The point is that one is always findable.
Pick a fixed time so you do not have to remember it. Right after the morning pills, or right before you turn off her lamp.
When it gets hard. Some days you will stand there with the pen and come up with nothing. On those days, write what was there instead of what she did. She turned toward the door when I came in. She let me wash her hair without fighting me. She slept without pain.
It will feel forced at first, and possibly fake. Write it anyway. This is not gratitude. You are recording observations, the same way you would record a fever, and observations do not require you to have a feeling about them.
When the subtraction starts up again in the car, read the last five lines.
Give it a month. What tends to happen is not that you feel better. It is that you end up holding a record of your mother instead of a record of her disease.
Sit with this
If you had to describe your mother as she is today, without once mentioning anything she used to be able to do, what would you say about her?
