Gray Area: Living for 2

Read the entire "Gray Area: Utah as it ages" series of reports here.

The other night, returning from dinner, Irene Gaddis asked her husband where they were going. Home, said Cal, and pretty soon they were driving through the gates of the condo complex.

"I want to go home," Irene said as they pulled up to their garage. Then she started to plead. "Please take me home."

Cal had two options then: to insist that they were home — the house they've lived in for 15 years — or to keep driving. Forty-five minutes later, after they had ridden around several neighborhoods, Cal distracting her with comments about how pretty the houses were, they drove back to the condo and everything was fine.

Five years of caring for a wife with Alzheimer's has taught Cal that it's better to change the subject than try to reason. He's also learned that if you're a caregiver you need to give yourself some caring, too. Accept help if it's offered, find it if it's not, he counsels. Join a support group. Take a class.

There are, by some estimates, more than 44 million family caregivers in the United States, many of them caring for aged parents or spouses. Some of this care is fairly minimal; some of it is so depleting that it makes the caregivers themselves sick. One study found that the immune systems of full-time caregivers are four times more vulnerable than those of non-caregivers, that even their wounds heal more slowly. This vulnerability can persist for years after the caregiving stops.

It's impossible and pointless to rank what kind of caregiving is harder than the next. But the consensus is that caring for a person with dementia produces its own kind of weariness. On top of the sleep deprivation and isolation most caregivers feel, there's the unique exhaustion of caring for a loved one who is no longer really sharing a life with you, who is both there and not there.

"Ambiguous loss" experts call it. "Unlike death, there is no closure, no official validation, and sometimes little community or religious support," explains a fact sheet provided by the national Family Caregiver Alliance, adding that this creates "a constancy of sorrow."

Here's how one Utah woman describes the journey she and her husband, both in their 80s, are taking through their old age. They used to have a big life. Now her husband, once so brilliant and engaging, can't remember how to make change for a dollar. For the past three years, as his dementia has worsened, her life has shrunk along with his. "I go for days without seeing anybody," she says. She spends those days at his side, trying to keep things steady and cheerful.