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Excerpts from Caregiving Part II

Awakening the Heart: Chapter 14

Every day gives abundant opportunity to decide whether to be a victim or to embrace the world. We all suffer one way or another, yet the fires of hell can ignite the heart. And once love is sparked, although its constancy may ebb and flow, it can never die. It is an awful grace that opens our hearts: Compassion lives in the here and now, and faces outward.

"In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy," says Brother David Steindl-Rast. Here are stories that reveal the power of unconditional love to widen the path and light the way.

 

Conclusion

My parents' deaths left a double-edged legacy: awareness of both the sorrow and the generosity of the human heart. Nowhere perhaps is this paradox more widely played out than on the daily stage of family caregiving, where the unsuspecting can find themselves on a chaotic journey in which the only certainty is the demise of their loved one. ... The burden is great, the information insufficient, the doubt overpowering. ... There is no question about taking on this role: They do so compelled not only by the dictates of society, but also the mandates of the heart.