Billie Baldwin lives outside of Bolivar and is a caregiver for her husband. She’s also a co-facilitator — alongside her friend Terri Lipe — of the Polk County/Bolivar area Caregivers Helping Caregivers support group, which meets once a month.
She spoke about how having a community of people with similar shared experiences can help family caregivers.
For the next few weeks, we'll be sharing the stories of caregivers from throughout the state.
Billie Baldwin: The biggest challenge is resources and how to get help caring for their person.
In the early days, their person can get in the car and go to town with them to run errands and pay bills, but as the disease progresses, a caregiver's world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller.
Even if you have a very strong church family, it's very common — not just in this area, but it's very common that if you're not there every Sunday or Wednesday or Thursday or Tuesday or Saturday or whenever you go — Out of sight, out of mind, you know, and your circle just gets smaller and smaller.
Unless you're going through it yourself, you don't know what someone else needs, and that's true of everything, but that's especially true of being a day-to-day caregiver.
We often call dementia “the living death.” Well, those caregivers are dying right alongside the people they're caring for.
So, our community here — we have a small community. Bolivar’s not a big town, 20,000 or so people. The resources are not there. There's no community place to take folks unless you're admitting them to the nursing home. It's exhausting.
I think my favorite part — and it really is the best thing about it and sometimes it really is the worst thing about it — is, Terri and I have worked so hard to create a safe space where people feel like they can come and they can purge emotionally and release that pressure valve just a little bit and know that it is shared and not judged, and that they are not alone in their journey.
The other people sitting around that table, while it's maybe not the exact same issue, have issues in common, or have had, or will have, and I really feel like it is creating that shared experiences — good, bad or otherwise.
And we do have, you know, we do have good things to share, and we do find the humor, but there's not a lot of good about dementia.
And when we can provide a couple of hours a month and let people come together and share that and know that they're not alone and that they, themselves, aren't crazy for feeling this way, that everything they're feeling is normal. You're supposed to feel this way. This is not what anyone signed up for.
That's my favorite thing — is getting to watch that and know that we are fostering that to help people survive their day-to-day journey.
