Caregiving
The Cost of Caregiving: Survivor’s Guilt
If I could turn back time, I certainly would. I try not to live life in the rearview, yet, as they say, hindsight is 20/20. I also believe that we learn from our past so that we can focus on our future more intentionally. However, after losing a loved one to cancer after years spent caregiving, I have admittedly experienced some survivor’s guilt. It has washed over me in waves and disrupted the life and identity I once had.
Read More...Living at a Crossroads: Juggling Caregiving and College
Just a few weeks after dropping me off for my first semester of college in 2014, my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer. Suddenly I had two lives. One where I was home taking care of him and trying to support my mom. The other was at college, where I juggled the guilt of not being present at school with the shame of not being there for my family.
Read More...My Place in the Family of Things
My Place in the Family of Things: How Nature Helps Me Cope as a Caregiver. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” – Mary Oliver
Read More...Untangling Survivorship Together
At the end of May 2005, my boyfriend Andrew was diagnosed with Acute Lymphatic Leukemia (ALL). He was twenty-two years old. I was twenty-three. Of all the things we were supposed to worry about in our early twenties, cancer was not supposed to be one of them.
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