Introduction
Human life sometimes resembles a strain of events significant enough to change one’s life in a completely different direction a few times within one’s journey in this world. One of these choices is related to the sacrifice of one’s personal life for the sake of saving the lives of others. However, while some people regard this choice as their direct job description (e.g., rescue teams, firefighters, police officers), others voluntarily give up their ambitions in order to take care of those around them (Gérain and Zech). The issue tackling these different phenomena is the fact that whereas the former sacrifice is not a long-term process, as saving one’s is frequently an endeavor that requires as little time as possible, so-called informal caregiving sometimes takes decades.
The very paradigm of patient-caregiver communication is mostly focused on the patients’ behavioral patterns and his or her level with satisfaction with current lifestyle and care. It goes without saying that people who no longer have the ability to take care of themselves are to be treated in the best possible way. However, with more than 15 million Americans taking care of their relatives, one might ponder their mental ability to cope with patients who often lose the desire to live (Kaminishi, Reza, and Hirsch). While the relatives with health issues feel depressed about being nothing but a burden to their loved ones, caregivers feel exhaustion, self-hatred because they are not able to help their relatives and ongoing guilt of feeling tired of taking care. Such a vicious cycle of contemplation eventually leads to the caregiver burnout, which scholars define as:
the degree to which a caregiver’s emotional or physical health, social life, or financial status has suffered as a result of caring for a relative with the major or mild neurocognitive disorder (NCD), other neuropsychiatric conditions, or functional impairment. (Kaminishi, Reza, and Hirsch 692)
Furthermore, there are many books and manuals for caregivers on how to behave around their relatives. However, there is barely a dozen of books aimed at helping the caregivers cope with the levels of stress, responsibility, and exhaustion they are going through every single day. Silent Struggler: A Caregiver’s Personal Story is a book written by Glenn Mallette through the prism of his personal experience of taking care of his wife. Hence, the book itself is a manifesto for those who encounter the same challenges on a daily basis, which encourages them to make their life fulfilled again.
Book Resume
Published in 2000 by Inspiration Press, Silent Struggler – an autobiographical novel, which reflects the author’s struggles and achievement throughout his caregiving journey – became Glenn Mallette’s debut in the writing career. While at first, Mallette had no intention for this book to become a best-seller, the idea behind actually paying attention to the caregivers’ community found quite positive feedback within both the target audience and religious community. The latter finds his works as an example of how a fellow human might find redemption in devoting one’s life to taking care of a soulmate while undergoing a series of challenges and desire to give everything up. With quite a little information given about the author, it is only possible to outline that Glenn Mollette has been a president of the Newburgh Theological Seminary for a long time, combining his work with a variety of hobbies such as songwriting. Thus, when looking at Glenn’s life, in the long run, one might reach a conclusion that his experience in finding fulfillment as a caregiver might actually be beneficial for those in the same situation.
Brief Summary
Silent Struggler: A Caregiver’s Personal Story is divided into a variety of chapters dedicated to the different aspects of taking care of a relative. Each of the thirty-nine presented chapters is devoted to a certain issue one might face when caregiving, with the range of issues tackling organization of chores, personal concerns, belief, and purely organizational matters like finding financial support for the process. The value of the story lies in the author’s first-hand experience with each of the discussed issues, which Mallette justifies by providing a number of examples. To obtain a better perspective of the book, some of the major concepts addressed in the book will be outlined in the following review, adding some personal ponderings of the notion of caregiving as a whole.
Is It Normal to Feel Exhausted?
When people create a family, they subconsciously accept the obligation to be around their loved ones both in sickness and health, regardless of what others say about them. However, quite often, this obligation hides an unbearable level of responsibility for other’s life underneath. Once a person is faced with such a challenge, the enthusiasm of always being around fades away with every day he or she gives up personal life. The tension doubles when people outside of the family start to express their rather judgmental opinion on how caregivers should look after their relatives, emphasizing on the inappropriateness of them feeling tired or depressed.
In his book, Mellette tries to convey the idea of allowing oneself to live through the fatigue he or she experiences from round-the-clock caregiving. In his perception of the issue, one of the most crucial factors that contribute to the constant feeling of guilt and self-loath is the external social pressure, especially that of the close surroundings. In the caregivers’ defense, the author states:
They don’t live in my house. They don’t know the pressures I have to deal with. Tending to the needs of a chronically ill patient three-hundred-sixty-five-days a year is vastly different than spending the weekend. (Mallette 133)
Thus, when people are remotely acquainted with the idea of caregiving without having experienced this on a long-term basis, they have no right to say how the person dealing with it first-hand must and should be feeling. This thought might provoke the reader to contemplate whether the ones bringing so much toxicity to their lives are worth being present in it, especially when the things are already not as they used to be. Even if they mean no harm by commenting on the way caregivers act, should not they be supportive enough to omit these subjective observations at all? Hence, while it is absolutely normal to accept the fact of being worn out, the real issue lies within one’s refusal to accept the right to feel down.
The Power of Empathy
Taking care of a loved one has a tremendous influence on the person in both physical and mental ways. On the one hand, the caregiver is to be physically responsible for two individuals twenty-four hours a day, making it of paramount importance to have a proper rest in order to maintain the health of a relative. On the other hand, seeing how a beloved relative is suffering from something one cannot help takes its toll on the mental health and overall emotional stability. Many people who find themselves in such a situation believe that they have no right to be upset around their relatives in order for them not to be even more upset about everything going on around them. However, according to the author of Silent Struggler, there is no point in hiding these emotions for them to destroy the individual inside, as when people love someone, they inevitably share every single emotion with them. Speaking of his wise, Mallette reflects:
I have seen Karen Struggle and weep. I have struggled and wept with her. She has been in the depths of despair. I have been in the depths of despair with her. You can’t love someone and care for them and stand idly by and watch them battle extreme physical and emotional pain without paying a toll. Sometimes the price is tremendous. (Mallette 137)
This passage reflects all the struggles caregivers deal with when observing their loved ones getting hurt. It goes without saying that for what it is worth, these people are willing to give the relatives everything they possibly can just to ease their physical and emotional pain. Many people, in such cases, try to hold on a little longer by distracting their relatives from reality, while everything they do is doing their best to drift from it themselves. Such an emotional block eventually leads to a lack of understanding between caregivers and relatives, causing stress and depression for both of them.
For this reason, Mallette’s book is aimed at proving that the power of empathy and compassion is often undermined by false beliefs in positive thinking prevalence in the caregiving process. Indeed, craving for the best for one’s care receiver is if crucial importance in the long term. However, when it comes to the day-to-day basis, it is barely possible always to do the right thing for everyone. When something becomes a severe obstacle, the caregiver should not pretend that everything is going according to the plan in order not to make someone upset. Life is not fair, it often makes everything go wrong in a blink of an eye. It is the caregiver who is always there to make these wrongs even slightly more tolerable.
Belief
When taking care of a chronically ill person, people tend to respond to the situation emotionally in quite different ways. Some people feel like they are betrayed when they see the struggle of their loved ones. As a result, they refuse to accept any belief in the better future, especially when it comes to the power of God and faith, as they no longer feel the support from someone who failed their relatives. Others, however, believe in the power of faith due to a strong desire to have something to rely on during their battle for the life of patients. While each of these choices is a highly individual matter, the former option is more likely to let one’s strength and hopes down due to a lack of encouragement to drive people. However, when people have something to believe in, not necessarily correlated with religion directly, their chances to hold on for a little longer are considerably higher, as they subconsciously feel they are not alone on this journey.
In Silent Struggler, the author explicitly emphasizes the importance of the Lord’s presence in their family when they were faced with the majority of changes. When feeling completely exhausted and lost, Mallette sincerely believed that God was the only one he could turn to for support and encouragement. The author’s relationship with religion is quite evident throughout the whole story, as some of the major climaxes in the journey of caregiving were symbolically related to an inexplicable intervention from above. Thus, in the chapter called “One Night,” Mallette dwells upon a story that happened on an ordinary day after dinner (Mallette). For a moment, his wife managed to feel a sudden burst of energy and strength in her legs. While crying, Karen was exclaiming her gracefulness to Lord, as He had finally heard her prayers. In fact, having an unbreakable faith in the powers above, both Glenn and his wife were coping with everything going on without giving up the desire to turn things back to the way they were. They were driven by this idea even though they realized that it was not possible.
Taking this into consideration, it should be emphasized that Glenn Mallette was paying much attention to the power of faith in God in terms of his family’s battle. Such an example does not mean that caregivers have to turn to religion when feeling burned out. In fact, forcing oneself to believe in God at times of misfortune will not make anyone happier with the way things are at the moment. The real message here was to find something that keeps people positive about their purpose in this life, as taking care of an ill person without inner purpose and faith ends up in an ongoing contemplation whether all of this is worth it. These thoughts, in their turn, make a caregiver feel guilty about feeling this way, turning back to the burden of self-loathe once again.
Financial Support
When speaking of the responsibilities of a caregiver, one would probably think of a person who helps their relatives dress, take a bath, go up and down the stairs, or buy groceries. Indeed, these are the duties caregivers face on a daily basis, not taking into consideration dozens of other little chores and emotional support around the clock. However, few people think of the financial basis of this care provision. In fact, it is one of the most challenging and depressing aspects of providing assistance, as the caregiver is responsible for the full-scale financial support of the patient. Whether it concerns making enough money to sustain the treatment and life or maintaining communication with healthcare facilities like Medicaid, the mental pressure is enormous.
In the Silent Struggler, Mallette addresses personal struggles correlated with the issue of finding healthcare aid programs and a series of red tape pitfalls hiding beneath projects-messiahs for people in similar situations:
On the surface, Medicaid sounds like an answer to many of our prayers, but it is not. In order to qualify, you must prove you are financially without means. A married couple with one spouse working does not qualify. However, if the working spouse divorces the invalid, leaving them with nothing, the long-term care facility will confiscate what little assets are left from the patient, and then Medicaid will take over the cost of the nursing home. (Mallette 158).
In fact, when seeing the heading of the chapter, the reader seeks redemption for their struggle, hoping to find an answer to the question that has been following them for years. However, the content of Mallette’s story is not intended to describe a how-to manual of securing one’s financial state. Instead, the idea could be interpreted as a desperate need to express the overwhelming burden of finding the needed support in a capitalistic system full of bureaucracy and inequality in terms of basic human needs. On the other hand, such an approach to the issue develops the ground for further collective effort development aimed at raising the issue on the global level.
In conclusion to the following chapter, Mallette advises all the caregivers to pool their efforts in the battle with authorities for providing quality support for the families with ill members. He emphasized the importance of demanding appropriate policies, even despite the fact that some caregivers might feel too exhausted to be emotionally engaged in other endeavors. In fact, such a position is one of the best options to address the issue, as it would be a mistake to give people too much hope for a better future instead of encouraging them to fight for it in their own ways.
The Book’s Value
Today’s segment of self-help literature is replete with a variety of books dedicated to some practical advice for almost any field of professional and personal life. However, while some people are actually seeking a set of tips aimed to help them deal with their issues or at least start to think in the right direction, others just want to know that they are not the only ones who feel desperate. Glenn Mallette’s primary goal was not to tell people the rights and wrongs of taking care but to show people that there is a huge community of like-minded caregivers that face the same issues on a daily basis. The courage to share with the world real feelings and thoughts of caregivers is a huge step in the direction of starting a community dialogue about the concept that was kept silent for quite a long time.
Moreover, the following book, although closely correlated with religion, has nothing to do with the evaluation of one’s actions, as it is frequently the case with religious authors nowadays. Instead, Mallette emphasizes the importance of giving oneself credit for the tremendous work caregivers perform every single day. Hence, Silent Struggler is a manifest to the people who sacrifice their lives for the sake of their loved ones. Having no step-by-step manual on how to deal with the given situation, this book provides the reader with the encouragement to continue what they do in spite of all the obstacles coming on the way. Taking everything into consideration, caregiving, when regarded not as a plain process of taking care of a relative, is a sophisticated construct that encompasses a great deal of physical and mental strength to cope with seemingly easy everyday chores. Silent Struggler: A Caregiver’s Personal Story is a book written by Glenn Mallette in order to assist people along their journey of support and sacrifice.
References
Gérain, Pierre, and Emmanuelle Zech. “Informal Caregiver Burnout? Development Of a Theoretical Framework to Understand the Impact of Caregiving.” Frontiers in psychology, vol.10, 2019, p. 1748.
Kaminishi, Kurtis S., Reza Safavi, and Calvin H. Hirsch. Geriatric Psychiatry. Springer, 2018.
Mallette, Glenn. Silent Struggler: A Caregiver’s Personal Story. Inspiration Press, 2000.