:console:

Kristen

I agree and empathise with you 100%, I also feel I am suffering and the whole family is suffering more than he is. He is bed ridden, on stomach feeds, needs help to go the bathroom, and after 33 years of marriage and more than two years of stroke, he is getting progressively worse. Sometimes I also think that a fast death is better than a slow, torturous one and I have had lots of people suffering and dying on me.

Oh, RLT. The tears are streaming down my face reading this. I have been feeling so much of the same thing with Larry. It is so hard to change your thinking and accept that this man that was your life really does not exist anymore- he's still there, but he's sombody else. He is forever changed, and some days he is angry and depressed, and takes it out on me. Some days I'm angry and depressed too, but I have bear it for us both. Yes, I do feel that it would have been better if he'd died on 4/22 - I could have accepted that. It's a horrible thing to say, but the reality is that this feels like neither life nor death. It's like Shakespeare..."those are pearls that were his eyes" - it's like Larry is become a changeling, like someone stole my man and replaced him with something "rich and strange"...I am rambling...but I so know what you are saying. I must surely be a bad person for thinking these thoughts, but they're unbidden and I can't help them. So, at least you know the truth about me - you are not alone!!

xxxoo

-Janine

For all you other caregivers out there who are feeling all these same feelings, I salute you. I have had so many other private comments on what I have shared here that I am so glad to have had the courage to put my true feelings in black and white. Too many people are afraid their feelings are unkind, disloyal, etc. That is just not so and I am learning that they are more common that I ever imagined.

Ruth

Ruth, I am so sad you have to be in this situation. At least for me Ray isn't violent. He is just "not there" a lot of the time. Our changes have come on over a long period of time and I am just learning to cope,with each change, through each bad patch, day by day.

Hope is always there, but sometimes, like gold, it takes some digging to find it.

((Hugs))) from Sue.