Mom & Me Four Archive

..."we" discovered that the ingenuity, mental acuity, emotional flexibility, social assertiveness, fortitude and spiritual expansion acquired through taking intense, hands-on, moment-to-moment care of our Ancient Ones was exactly the type of neurological "exercise" needed to protect us from Alzheimer's and other types of systemic dementia?
    Suppose it turns out that the drastic reordering of mid-life priorities and assumptions about what it means to be human required of the full time caregiver are responsible for a psycho-somatic chemical/electrical reaction that intervenes in the physical processes that lead to dementia? What if "Brain Age", crossword puzzles, learning a new language and physical activity were only the insignificant tip of a profound protective iceberg?
    Further, what if it didn't matter whether the caregiver fought to "stay cheerful" and "find time for oneself"? What if what mattered was the depth of the bond created between caregiver and intense needs care recipient and the ability and willingness to recognize, use and best, with one's native faculties, the inevitable discouragement, depression, rage, helplessness, hopelessness and sense of loss with which the intense needs caregiver must deal; and that the more involved one becomes in the care recipient's life, thus the more rigorous and sustained the neurological workout, the more protection one achieves?
    Can you imagine everyone's (including intense needs caregivers') surprise when the results are tallied and it turns out that the only current study of caregivers, the lone one that suggests that caregivers are better off than their peers when caregiving ends, is the only study with even slightly accurate results? How much of a flurry will it cause, once we baby boomers have, as we usually do, submitted ourselves to rigorous study, when we realize that all the "negative", "regrettable" circumstances surrounding caregiving, if surrendered to, are exactly the circumstances that catalyze the organism to guard against what seem, at present, like the inevitable infirmities of old age?
    What if "we" learn that those who have decided to take on the world and what we now call "the burden" of caregiving for the Ancient and the Infirm have, in fact, done exactly what one needs to do to prevent the systemic development of senile dementia: Taken on and adjusted to the twin yokes of exceptional compassion and empathy for one human being for several years?
    Wouldn't it be funny if, out of pure self-interest, people were, then, motivated, globally, to become acutely other-interested in the most vulnerable segments of our population?
    Wouldn't that be a hoot?