Stay Strong

 

Last year, I never bought the potted mums I usually put in the front yard, but I had three I’d saved in the garage from the year before. To my surprise, they bloomed. When they died late fall last year, I figured they were done. The pots sat outside the back door through the winter. The mums, of course, never developed green leaves so I dumped them out and put the pots away.

 

I was out walking my dog yesterday and I glanced over toward the small flower garden that we’d dug up in early spring. I did a double take, and there was a tiny mum blooming at the edge of the garden. I had discarded the plants because they were dead and ugly, yet one was strong enough to survive my bad treatment.

 

Have you noticed how some people seem to flourish no matter how badly life treats them? Others fall into despair at the first sign of adversity. It is a mystery as to how differently people cope with the challenges in life.

 

I just finished Kristin Hannah’s book The Four Winds. The story takes place during the depression and when the dust storms hit the Great Plains. Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. Elsa and her kids finally headed west to California where they believed they would have a better life.

 

I couldn’t help but think of the song, “California Cotton Fields,” that Jim used to sing. While looking for a change of luck, they found broken dreams, and hardships beyond what they could have ever imagined. Broken dreams do not always mean broken spirits.

 

When tragedy strikes, we can often rebound and continue with our normal life…eventually. When we have daily hassles that try our patience and undermine our confidence, we might buckle beneath the weight of our burdens.

 

Caregiving is fraught with adversity. The daily stress of providing a safe and healthy environment for another human being is crushing at times. Compound that with loneliness, lack of sleep, and constantly feeling overwhelmed and you have a recipe for disaster.

 

What are some ways of coping with life when you are bombarded with problems? I don’t know how other people do it, but here are some things that worked for me:

 

1.      Ask for help. Whether I received help from family, friends, or professionals, I finally came to the realization that I couldn’t do it alone. The most valuable resource I found was my local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association.

2.      Join a support group. I was amazed at how much I learned during support group meetings. We exchanged ideas and I made new friends. Best of all, I learned from others and didn’t have to figure everything out on my own.

3.      Find a way to turn heartbreak into a positive. By becoming a volunteer, an advocate, and fundraising for the Walk to End Alzheimer’s, I found a way to turn my passion into action. I gained a purpose, a mission, and felt the positive energy when I  focused on my small victories rather than my losses.

4.      Take care of yourself. When I was a caregiver, I spent so much time taking Jim to doctor appointments, that I often neglected my own health. Then, one day I realized that he depended on me and if I didn’t take care of myself, I couldn’t take care of him. I made an effort to etch out time to relax, regroup, and rejuvenate.

 

Be kind to yourself as well as to others. No one is perfect and we all make mistakes, but if we focus on the multitude of daily tasks we do right, we can be more forgiving of our occasional hiccups.

 

Think about the mistreated and discarded mum that blossomed into a beautiful flower. Sure, it is smaller than a pampered mum from a garden center, but it serves as proof that if we stay strong we can not only survive, we can thrive.

 

Copyright © October 2021 by L.S. Fisher

http://earlyonset.blogspot.com

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