The Power of Gratitude

I write this while recognizing that so many of you are deep into the brutal journey of caregiving. I hope it does not feel like some lecture. It's the experience I had and I felt like it might help someone if I shared.

Early on in this awful journey, I was so blinded by my wife's and my own pain while I was caregiving that I had to make a change to my attitude at some point. I picked trying to find something to be grateful for every day. At the beginning of trying to find gratitude, I rarely meant it. I was angry and exhausted and sad and stressed and depressed. I think I may have nearly lost my mind a couple of times while caregiving. I kept trying to find gratitude anyway. I had no idea if it would ever work for me, but I felt something was important about remembering gratitude in the midst of all this pain. It became, together with finding respite time, the way for me to fight for my own survival.

And so I'd wake and find anything. The sun. Our house. The cats. My DW was still sleeping so I had some time alone. Anything I could claim to be grateful for. I'd say I didn't really believe it for nearly a year.

That moved to hiring caregivers and me getting to take walks alone more often. The gratitude slowly became real in those walks. Walking on a beautiful northern California beach will do that to a person. The beauty of this world started to remind me of all the wonderfulness in the world and my world: My DW and I felt we'd found the love of our lives. We'd laughed so much together. We each had satisfying careers. We'd been successful after growing up poor. I have a wonderful family and amazing friends, one I've had since kindergarten. We'd cried together as both her parents passed. We'd fought for our relationship when her caregiving of her own mother with dementia overtook our lives and I got pushed aside, feeling alone for several of her intense caregiving years. Our love never stopped, despite any of that. It didn't stop in dementia either, though I lost her piece by piece.

Now I find myself filled with gratitude, even as I cry every day about losing her in February 2026. All of that other gratitude that became real just started to compound. I'm grateful to be alive. I'm grateful I fought for myself. I'm grateful that I found it in me to care for her with more love and gentleness than I thought I possessed. I'm grateful for art and music and nature and marvel at it with different eyes than I had before. I want to take advantage of every minute I have left in this life and to be appreciative of it. The gratitude I've felt has sometimes been overwhelming these last few months. I am definitely not complaining about that. It's been remarkable and rather wonderful to have that to balance out my deep, deep grief. It's why I keep telling my friends and family that I know I will be ok.

Please hang in there and I hope you all find a way to honor and care for yourselves even as you spend so much of yourself caring for the one you love.

Big hug.