Reflections on Assisted Living in My Home in the Digital Age

I never expected to be living with a stranger in our home. But now, I welcome strangers as caregivers for my beloved wife, Geri. This started back in November of last year when a bad case of food poisoning left me with an extremely painful back and arm injury. The back healed, but the arm, based on an earlier injury and operation, will never have sufficient strength to safely keep my wife from falling. When she was released from the hospital, then the rehabilitation center, it was essential to have caregivers doing what I had done for the years since her Parkinson’s led to her breaking her hip and the gradual deterioration of other parts of her body. Our rehabilitation specialist friend had warned me for years that my body would eventually fail to take the strain of caring for her, but I protested that I could do it all. Unfortunately, I was wrong. In retrospect, I realized that not only the physical but also the enormous psychological strain of fearing that Geri would fall and hurt herself as I helped her was too much for me to bear over a long period. It wore me down.