Marriage in Midlife | How Caretaking Elderly Parents Affects Relationships

They’ve arrived! Those glorious midlife years when your grown children are living on their own and the demands of your professional career have slowed. You may be eagerly anticipating traveling, getting back to the hobby you put aside or enjoying your grandkids. Then you get the call. Your elderly family member is sick or has fallen. Decisions must be made. Care must be given. Before you can take a breath, you find yourself busier than before.

Previous generations have cared for elders, but modern medicine has allowed many to survive with chronic conditions, people are living longer than ever before. The increasing number of blended families also multiplies those who might end up needing assistance. Almost every family will spend at least some time caring for an elderly parent.

How can you balance the demands of helping your aging parents finish well with the other relationships and responsibilities in your life? How can you keep caregiving from damaging your marriage?

Terry Hargrave, Ph.D., a professor of Marriage and Family Therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary, and his wife, Sharon, LMFT, have spent decades speaking and writing about marriage, forgiveness, family dynamics, aging, caregiving and intergenerational issues. Sharon is also an affiliate faculty member in the Marriage and Family Therapy department at Fuller Theological Seminary and has been in private practice for more than 25 years specializing in couples and intergenerational issues.

Terry has written several books based on their experiences caring for both Sharon’s mother and his parents, including Loving Your Parents When They Can No Longer Love You and Boomers on the Edge. The subject remains fresh, as they still caretake Terry’s 89-year-old mother. The death of Terry’s grandfather opened their eyes to the need to help families grow together rather than apart during a challenging season of caretaking.

Terry grew up in an abusive home. His strained relationship with his mother was in part a result of the dysfunction between her and her father. Called to his grandfather’s death bed, Terry realized the awkwardness of having no last words or feeling of closeness to convey. He was deeply moved as his young wife, Sharon, reached down, cradled the man’s “basketball-sized” face gently in her hands, and told him she loved him and would miss him. Terry realized the emptiness in his heart and determined to learn how to help others and himself.

“There were so many issues between me and him,” he said. “As a budding marriage and family therapist, I realized I had to get on this. I made a determination that day I needed to learn how to help families finish well,” he said. He began managing an elder care facility while writing his graduate school dissertation on the subject. Sharon worked alongside him. They saw some heartbreaking situations, including adult children tricking their parents into packing and then leaving them stranded at the door of the personal care home.

Terry started writing and teaching in the late 1980s. His first book titled Finishing Well,  addressed aging and reparation in the intergenerational family. In 1998 Sharon’s mom’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis was confirmed, along with the realization her mom abused alcohol to numb herself from painful past loss. After her death, they helped Terry’s father during his battle with liver cancer. They continue to care for his mother, as her broken hip and strokes have left her with an impaired memory.

While they’ve learned things experientially through their own caregiving journey, the Hargraves have counseled, researched or taught about breaking intergenerational family pain for more than three decades.

“The caregiving experience is to help the elder pass well, but the better you are able to negotiate that, the better you set yourself up for how to do that well for the next generation. The things you really struggle with in your intergenerational relationship will be the same things you struggle with in your marriage. We’re kidding ourselves if we believe the struggle is solely about the marriage, solely about our children. They are all tied together,” Terry said. “The reason I take care of my parents is for my children’s sake. The promise in the Bible is to honor your father and mother so you will have a long life. You are not honoring them for their sake, you are honoring them because that is what makes family work.”

Terry credits his wife with teaching him how to emotionally connect so he could find the love in his heart to caretake his mother.

“If not for Sharon, I’d never have been a caregiver for my parents,” he said. Terry believes caregiving reflects the true Agape love of Jesus that when realized, spills out into other relationships.

“I was learning to love my mother-in-law when she couldn’t speak or walk, when the object loved couldn’t do anything in return.” (The subject matter addressed in Loving Your Parents When They Can No Longer Love You).

“You think the love you have for your children is the greatest love you’ll ever have for any human being. Children grow, begin to achieve new skills, and as a parent you feel fulfillment, but every day you care for your parent, they get worse off. You are doing this unselfish sacrificing and caring for them. Sacrificial love. Agape love. That strengthens the family. It’s not about guilt,” Terry said. Caregiving helps our elder and changes us more deeply. We love our spouse better; we love our children better.”

Sharon agreed, “Some of my most passionate feelings for my marriage have come from watching Terry care for my mom and his parents. What a remarkable, caring, sensitive man he is in these difficult situations. It makes me love him all the more.”

Caring for an elderly parent will impact your marriage one of two ways. It will either tear it apart or make it stronger. If you decide that you will go through it together, through thick and thin, you’ll learn from the experience and grow together.

“Caregiving is the closest to Philippians 2: 5-8 that we will ever get,” Terry added.

“Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedientto death – even death on a cross!”

Terry purports the number one job of the caregiving spouse is to support the caregiver. “The heavy lifting, whether we like it or not, will boil down to one caregiver. You have to care for the caregiver.”

“It was always helpful for us to know we were supporting each other and sharing the pain,” Sharon said. Both Sharon and Terry assumed the primary role for their respective parents. “We (as a society) have an idea in our mind that only females are caregivers,” Sharon said. “I, as the daughter-in-law, cannot care in the same way the blood relative child will.”

For some, seeing God’s purpose in the situation and finding love for the caregiving spouse is not their default emotion. The exhausting physical and emotional demands can cause distance to grow between spouses as their marriage is put on the back burner. Needs aren’t being met, but they can’t really complain because their spouse is stretched so thin with their parent. Terry exhorts the non-primary care spouse to lean in with care for their spouse rather than pull away.

“The most common thing when people take over caregiving is to squeeze out everything else. You can’t do that in this day and time. You can’t spend five years with caregiving as priority, or you’ll lose your marriage,” Terry admonished. He encourages caregivers to have a conversation with their spouses about what they can realistically focus on with the elderly parent — time, money, relationship, logistics.

“It is so easy to get overwhelmed with all the tasks,” Sharon added. Don’t let this tear your marriage apart. Words like, “I know you’ve had a hard day. How can I serve you?” can really help. Be aware of their stress and pain so you can think about ways to be supportive.

“This is an effort that will forever change your spouse,” Terry said. “They don’t need somebody on the supply chain to them, they need somebody in the foxhole with them.”

 He advises those not yet involved helping their parents to start developing a caregiving plan that realistically addresses logistics. It should include agreement on what medical interventions they are willing to make to prolong life. His watchwords, “Talk early and talk often,” apply even to younger couples. “You are going to need it,” he said.

Sharon recounted the comfort they felt that Terry’s parents had written letters to them listing their wishes. “Make sure now to give your kids power and knowledge about what to do when it is your turn.”

Along the way, the Hargraves learned a few things – wisdom that became the foundation of Boomers on the Edge.