Navigating the Complex World of Elder Caregiving: Unwritten Challenges and Lessons Learned

Amy Stone [00:00:03]:
Beth Buttram, welcome to Imperfect Adulting.

Beth Butram [00:00:06]:
Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

Amy Stone [00:00:09]:
I’m happy you’re here. Are you ready for a great chat?

Beth Butram [00:00:12]:
I am.

Amy Stone [00:00:13]:
Let’s do it. All right. I begin every interview asking people where they call home, what part of the world you’re in. So where are you today?

Beth Butram [00:00:23]:
I am smack dab in the middle of Indiana in the US It’s a little town called Lafayette.

Amy Stone [00:00:30]:
Lafayette, Indiana. So I’m in Miami, Florida. And before we started recording, Beth asked me if it was cold where I am. And it is cold by Miami standards today here, but that is not cold anywhere else. And I’m not allowed to complain about the fact that I’m cold inside my house and I’m wearing socks and long sleeves and I’ve been drinking heated liquids all day long. And that’s how that goes.

Beth Butram [00:00:56]:
It was toasty 4 degrees when I woke up this morning.

Amy Stone [00:01:00]:
This is why I’m not allowed to complain. It was, it was 50 when I was out for my walk and I was really, really cold. And I don’t know what it is now. It’s probably. We don’t still get, we just don’t get that chill down here very often and we’re poorly prepared for the situation. And I can’t even complain about. It’s. There’s snow in other parts of Florida, which, like, never happens. So I really, I cannot complain. But, but I will anyway. As you hear, I am in the middle of the complaint regardless. Okay. I love to take a second and learn about people’s personal backgrounds. Before we dive into the meatier topics, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself, like, outside of work, like who’s in your family? Do you have any pets, whatever sort of get to know you type stuff you think the audience might like to know?

Beth Butram [00:01:44]:
Sure. I am a mom and a grandmother. I go by Nana. I have two beautiful granddaughters. One is seven and one is nine. I am lucky enough to have three biological children. Only my middle daughter has graced me with a grandchild and I don’t think the boys are going to follow suit. But there’s still time.

Amy Stone [00:02:07]:
There’s still time. All right, very good.

Beth Butram [00:02:09]:
And then I have two bonus children. I don’t call them step, I call them bonus children. And I have a nine year old granddaughter with my bonus daughter.

Amy Stone [00:02:21]:
That’s a beautiful family.

Beth Butram [00:02:23]:
Yes. And they’re, they’re pretty local. We get to see the 9, almost 10 year old at least a couple times a week and about once a month for the younger granddaughter. So pretty lucky.

Amy Stone [00:02:37]:
Very cool. Very cool. That’s a beautiful family. I love when people. I’m also a stepmom, and the words, the words never impacted me, but they do a lot of people. And I love that we are around in a time where you get to choose the words you want. And the example I give people is actually you choose your own name. With grandma and great grandma and great great Grandma, you get to choose, right? You get to choose what you’re going to be called. And so it also works with stepmom bonus mom. I’ve heard a lot of varieties from that. I’ve heard a lot of varieties, and so it’s all good. My step kids call me Amy, they call me by my name. And it never was, Never was much of a thing, but I am a grandma too, through my stepdaughter. And so I sometimes say I’m a step grandma, which I’m not even sure if that’s a real word. I don’t know if that’s. I don’t know if. I don’t know if anybody uses it. So there we go.

Beth Butram [00:03:31]:
All right.

Amy Stone [00:03:31]:
The topic of the day is we’re going to talk about the isolation of caregiving and how that changes priorities. Does that sound like a good thing? Thing to talk about?

Beth Butram [00:03:43]:
Based on the fact that this podcast is. Is about imperfect adulting, I am a stellar candidate for that conversation.

Amy Stone [00:03:51]:
I think that most people fall under the category of imperfect if they’re being honest. And so I. I have a whole list of. Of questions and we’ll go for it, but we’ll just have a conversation because. And see how it goes before we dive into caregiving. I want to quickly roll back the clock and talk about you and we’ll circle back around to this at the very, very end. But think back to a much, much, much, much younger. Not much, much, much. Choose how many muches you want. Think about a younger you like back when you were in high school and what were your favorite school subjects? What were your hobbies, what were the things you wanted to do? And if you remember, what were your dreams about your future life at that time?

Beth Butram [00:04:35]:
Oh, wow. So I was torn as a high schooler between going to Disney and being a performer there, or my dad was in love with opera music. And so I. It was a very, very long time ago. Beverly Sills was still pretty popular, if anyone’s old enough to remember who that is. And I wanted to be an opera singer as my back career. So I actually chose to go to school as A vocal performance major and never used that degree for that purpose, but that was my aspiration in high school. I have done a lot of community theater to turn it into a hobby and also participate in a community choir. So I still sing, but just for fun.

Amy Stone [00:05:34]:
Well, that is the ultimate purpose of the reason we should do things. So I want to validate that for sure. And so you did. That’s a beautiful. That is a beautiful career, beautiful dream. So you are a parent and you are a grandparent and you also have parents. That’s the way the circle of life works in most cases. So there are a lot of different ways that we could talk about caregiving, but the one that we’re going to talk about today is caregiving for your parents. Not for people who are younger than you, but for your parents. How long ago was it that you took on the role of shifting from daughter who is cared for to daughter who is caring for parents?

Beth Butram [00:06:17]:
Well, from 2015 to 2018, I cared for my dad remotely, mostly. He actually was in Florida, but I spent many, many, many weeks and took countless trips to help give care to him and then ultimately be by his side once he transitioned to long term care. And we lost him in 2018. I recently lost my mom after a long term caregiving situation. She moved to my town about three years ago and then moved in with me for her last six months of life. So. But that loss is pretty fresh. But I, I’m finally ready to talk about it. I lost her in November and so it’s something, I’m sorry, November of last year. So it is, it is still fresh. And I learned many things from both situations for different, very different reasons.

Amy Stone [00:07:38]:
Okay, so I’m going to ask a little bit of backstory to put together the family tree, but tell me to buzz off if you don’t want to provide this information on the podcast. So you mentioned that your dad was in Florida. Were your parents still married? Were they together in Florida? Okay, so. And was your mom always in Indiana?

Beth Butram [00:07:55]:
No, she was actually in Illinois. And there was a point in time where she started to feel worse and worse. And it was getting to the point where she could no longer mow the lawn. She could was finding it difficult to go grocery shopping. She was getting confused during doctor’s office visits. She was typically non compliant with her medication regimens, those types of things.

Amy Stone [00:08:28]:
And that’s a very caregiver word, non compliant.

Beth Butram [00:08:32]:
And she was getting more and more reliant. She was calling. I was noticing that she was calling me a lot more Often and asking for advice or just telling me about things or telling me that the doctor wasn’t making sense and could I call him and ask him what he meant. And really starting to lean in on me. And so that was kind of my first clue because she was otherwise very independent. And she fought me tooth and nail on moving to Indiana. To be quite honest, she felt that Illinois was her home and with good reason. And we tried to keep her there for as long as we physically could, but she ended up in the hospital. And during that hospital stay, we realized that she had some more serious issues than she initially anticipated. It was a condition called pulmonary fibrosis. And then she had a different condition with her blood where it was going to slowly turn into leukemia. And so she was on a chemotherapy pill permanently in order to. It was low dose, but, you know, that was the only way to stop the leukemia from setting in. So with those two things, her breathing started to become an issue. And so that made it even harder to get around. And then that’s what led us to come to the decision that maybe it was time for her to move to Indiana, but she was not going to live with me. So we found her an apartment that was not assisted living. It was independent living, but it was in an apartment complex where there were a couple of pull cords and a kind of a community. The building was very much kind of a Peyton Place, but in a fun way, you know, where they had their little coffee clutch. So she had a little bit of community that was kind of built into the little apartment complex. And it was the perfect scenario for her. So that was. We were very blessed because there was a waiting list and she cleared the waiting list while in the hospital. So that was.

Amy Stone [00:10:42]:
Wow. All right, so to recap. And do you mind if I. I’m going to ask you a question. This is a. This borders on the. You were never supposed to ask how old people are, right? Like, this is an old timey, like this sort of thing. But for people who are listening, who are at a different stage of life, I think that when we talk about caregiving, this is something that doesn’t occur to anybody when they’re in their 20s or 30s or even 40s. And so putting a benchmark out there, like, do you mind me asking how old your mom was when you were having this discussion about moving her into independent living and you guys were having that.

Beth Butram [00:11:15]:
We started having the conversation when she was about 72 and we realized she had some chronic illnesses, but it was at the age of 75. When this came to fruition.

Amy Stone [00:11:25]:
Okay. Yeah. So one of the things I’ve realized in having these conversations I think is really interesting is I think. And I have zero experience and zero knowledge and zero expertise. The number of people who should listen to me about this opinion that I’m about to share is zero. Not even myself. But I don’t think that this is a conversation or anything that happened to previous generations. I think that we are in new territory with the way we work with growing families and how long we live and how far apart we live from each other, that I really think that these are the reason some of us are experiencing new things. This is not what my parents went through with their parents. And it is different. What kind of. One of the things that would have made if, like, if I put my. Myself in your mom’s shoes, she was living in Illinois, which means that she had a community and a life there. And. And she. To shift that in your 70s. That’s. Doesn’t sound like. Yeah, that doesn’t. That. That would be hard. That’s a big ask.

Beth Butram [00:12:25]:
Well, she waited until she really had no choice, to be quite honest. And I tried to support her from afar, but as I kind of implied earlier, I had been down that road with my dad, and that was a very negative outcome. I had a stepmother that would take a whole nother two episodes to walk through that had some denial issues. And that’s as far as we’ll go on this conversation. But. But you really can’t help someone remotely. To the same extent. The biggest lesson I learned with my dad was not getting his personal wishes in writing. I was winging it and doing what I felt in my heart at the end that needed to be done for him because he had no paperwork in order. And so the discussion decisions got. Had to be made independently. And that is a huge burden on the person that has to make the decisions. Yeah, with my mom, I did learn that lesson. And the thing that we did was we did talk about it. It was painful to talk about the time that there would be an end, but, you know, at the time that we were given a chronic condition that was not curable and that it was going to progress and it was going to make her life more difficult as time went on, I wanted to make sure that I honored her wishes. And there’s this thing. I actually work within the healthcare industry, although it’s an administrative role, but I get a lot of exposure to good, you know, medical people that give me really good advice. And there’s this thing called person centered thinking, where you put aside what it is that you want and you ask a lot of questions about what the other person desires and you try to honor and respect that to the greatest extent possible, even when it’s not necessarily the. Your personal idea of the best decision, as long as it’s not going to harm the other person you, or you’re not breaking a law or something like that, you know, you try to honor that. And so I was careful to have those conversations with her and felt very much more comfortable. We got a living will in place. We did a healthcare power of attorney. We made sure that all of her doctors had access to that information so that if she did end up in the hospital unexpectedly, that there were no barriers to me being able to step in when she was unable to speak for herself. Those types of things are so very important. And you never know. It could be someone fully capable, competent, healthy, and it’s just a terrible T bone car accident and suddenly, you know, they broke their jaw or whatever. I mean, we’ll try not to go any more macabre than that. But something that knocks them out or. And they have a concussion, something like that. So that, you know, that, you know, you’re making decisions on their behalf and there is somebody to make decisions on their behalf.

Amy Stone [00:15:31]:
Yeah, no, yeah. It. It’s definitely not anything that you think about until, until it’s in front of you. And so it’s, it’s all the things that you talked about. It’s also the emotional pressure of trying. If you don’t have the discussion, the conversations, like, listen, they’re not fun. They’re not fun to have the conversations, but it actually is a blessing to be able to have the conversations and have that awkward moment. And without that, the pressure to make the decisions in a highly emotional state has got to be really, really hard. My dad passed away from heart disease and he had, he had cardiac surgery. That. And that’s when we began to have those conversations and get organized. And I didn’t realize how much of a gift that was until much later. Right. Just, it was like. It was, you know, it was just a very, very big gift. We, like, were able to consolidate some things. I mean, it’s still a huge mess of a process, but you’re lucky to have it. So that’s a long season of caregiving. A long season of caregiving. Your dad had some support. He wasn’t remote like he had your stepmom. Right. So there was somebody else doing some of those things. Sounds like that was A complication and not always a blessing. Families can be very complicated. Did your mom have any support in Illinois before she came to live with you? Had she remarried or was she by herself?

Beth Butram [00:16:57]:
No, she was living alone. There was a nephew that was available in an emergency situation if necessary, that was always very gracious with his time when needed. But, you know, my mom came from that. I don’t know if it’s generational or what, but, you know, I heard more times than I didn’t want to, I said, why didn’t you call him? And she would say, well, I didn’t want to be a bother, or, you know, like, I didn’t die. So it’s all good. I made it through. You know, like, you know, she. One time she just, on a cold day spilled her groceries out onto the.

Amy Stone [00:17:38]:
Onto the ground.

Beth Butram [00:17:40]:
Yeah. Outside her home. And she couldn’t. She. She stooped down to get a couple of things and then that tuckered her out and then she couldn’t get the rest and so she left him out there and it was cold and it was fine, and she went back out and picked him up later. But rather than calling and saying, hey, I dropped two big bags of groceries on the ground. Can you come help me pick them up? He was literally six blocks away, you.

Amy Stone [00:18:02]:
Know, and that is actually an excellent example of things that we don’t realize that you can’t do after a certain point. I, my. I have some relatives that are in their late 80s and 90s, and they have these very creative adaptations in and around their house. And when I would see them for the first time. So for example, they have a long. A pair of tongs that they use for fishing laundry out of the laundry machine because they can’t bend over and lift. And they’re vibrant and healthy. And the first time I saw it, I was like, what is this? But then when I saw how they were using it, I was like, that’s very smart. That’s very smart. But you think of it when you’re 20, 30, 40, the idea of picking something up off the ground is not even a second glance, not even a second thought. And these are the day to day things that become more challenging as we age. It’s also the reason for all the people who are listening to this and they’re getting the advice that they need to lift heavy stuff in their younger age. That’s why, that’s why we want to do that.

Beth Butram [00:19:03]:
Right.

Amy Stone [00:19:03]:
It’s like, this is the example. When you were younger, did you ever anticipate, did you Have a sense that caring for your parents when you’re older was going to be one of your responsibilities.

Beth Butram [00:19:14]:
Never, never crossed my mind, never thought to have the conversations with them. It was my, my dad’s issue was dementia. And so that, you know, by the time I realized the conversations I should have had, it was too late because he was no longer competent. So it was really, really a shocker to me. And I had just expected them to grow old and someday they would die in their sleep when I was in my 60s or 70s. And because they seemed so vibrant until they weren’t. And, you know, I mean, my dad was super active. You know, his, his, he got lots of intellectual stimulation. He took walks every day. Everything seemed to be great. And then, you know, another one of the big lessons I learned after the fact was that he started noticing that his. Well, first of all, his hearing wasn’t great and it was also the dementia, but his wife was really good at explaining it away with the hearing loss. And so I started doing emails. Well, at some point, his emails started getting inconsistent. I mean, this was a very intelligent, articulate man. He wrote articles for newsletters within his vocation. He, he never made a grammar or a spelling error. And I started seeing, you know, partial sentences, words that were not capitalized, things that just didn’t make sense. And I would ask because it seemed like he was a little confused, but then the response would come back, oh, he was just in a hurry or whatever. There was always like an excuse or, oh, I must just not have noticed that. You know, I’m, I just, you know, hit the button too early or whatever it was. And then one day I was there and I can’t remember the reason for it, but I went and, and helped him in his office and he had like 1500 unread emails. And I’m like, man, how do you stay organized with this many unread emails? And, and I hear from the peanut gallery, his wife saying, well, that’s not the worst of it. He’s, you know, spends all sorts of money and our credit card bill is out of this world. And so I offered to take a look at it. And sure enough, he kept. Every time one of those pop ups came, he would click on it and buy the antivirus software.

Amy Stone [00:21:54]:
Oh, wow.

Beth Butram [00:21:55]:
And he had 17 or 18 of those subscriptions going. And some of them were with the, I found like six or seven with the same company. And, you know, what a scam.

Amy Stone [00:22:06]:
Yeah, that, that makes my, that makes me a little upset on behalf of your dad. There like to tell you the truth. On the other hand, I did always wonder who was buying those pop ups, who was falling for that. Now I know I’m not happy to know, but I did, I did always wonder the. It’s. This is an interesting thing. One of the reasons that I like to share these stories is because there’s no way for you to have known these things, right? We, we are, we only have the experience that we have. And there are people, whether they’re professionals in the industry or other adults who have, are a few steps ahead of us or have a different experience, who can shed light on it. But we need exposure to those people. You need exposure to somebody who says, oh, wow, you know what? You should ask the following couple questions. They might help you figure things out. But there’s no, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves or we can, I don’t know that you did. I hope you didn’t. But we can put a lot of pressure on ourselves. Like, I wish I had noticed sooner. I wish I had known more. I wish I had been able to intervene more. And the other side of that is that you didn’t know and there’s no way you could have known. And these are people you love and when they tell you, oh, I was in a hurry, of course you believe them because you love them and that’s the story and you want to believe it. And I also think that there’s a part of this that not just with aging and with caregivers, it’s not. You don’t want to think that something is going wrong. You’re not looking for the thing that could be going wrong. And so it doesn’t, you don’t see it. Agreed. So you’ve already shared a lot of things that were unexpected about this process. How did. Let’s talk, let’s begin to talk a little bit about how, how it was impacting you, your daily life, the relationships you had, stuff like that. Like what was. Your father was living a long way away. And so that was probably different than when your mom came and lived locally. But what kind of impact did it have on your day to day life?

Beth Butram [00:24:02]:
Well, with the, the situation with my dad, I’ll try to be brief because I was spending so much time traveling between Indiana and Florida, all of my friendships started falling off. So when in 2018 it became apparent that he was going to pass, I remember I had driven down because I couldn’t get a flight. And I’m driving home and I’m immensely sad because I’m getting The news that they’re putting him in the hospice situation and he’s gonna not make it, basically, like he’s not gonna ever improve beyond that. They were trying everything they could to get some.

Amy Stone [00:24:48]:
No further medical interventions.

Beth Butram [00:24:50]:
Yeah. So I was dealing with that and I am driving and all of a sudden I realize I no longer had anybody besides my husband or, you know, one of my kids who had already heard me ad nauseam to call on the way home just to, you know, decompress or to even have just a normal conversation so that I didn’t have to think about that while I was driving because it was just really, really difficult. And I had made that particular trip completely alone because I wasn’t willing to not make the trip. Yeah. That was the first indication that I even had realized that I had let all of my self care go. I had let everything about how I had been living life and put it to the side. And it was a cross to bear that I did willingly, but I wasn’t considering the impact to my own self as I was doing it. And I didn’t realize it that way at that time.

Amy Stone [00:26:01]:
Right. It’s a slippery slope. It starts. Yeah, it starts with one decision to not call somebody back because you’re doing the good thing. You’re leaning into the. Your kids or your parents.

Beth Butram [00:26:13]:
Well, and then you’re like, you can. You can think of somebody, but it’s been so long since you’ve connected with them. You’re like, well, I’m not going to call them to go cry on their shoulder. And they’re going to be like, oh, well, you’re just, you know, why are you calling now? Where have you been all this time? So, you know, you just, you put yourself in that situation and it just happens unknowingly. So after my dad, it took. It took me some time. And I. I was. I was really, really struggling and I was. And the grief was bad and I was angry at my stepmother and, you know, I mean, there was just so much going on. I was not grieving well. And I remember my bonus daughter saying something to me about, you know, you’re just not yourself and you seem really sad. You know, have you considered talking to somebody? Someone? And I remember my initial reaction was, no, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine, I’m fine. You know, I’m just a little tired. I’m stressed out with work. And, you know, and then I reflected and I realized, yes, she’s right. I just didn’t want to admit it.

Amy Stone [00:27:21]:
And that’s really, that’s really enlightened for her. After when I was grieving my dad, it was my, it was my father in law who said to me, he said I was behaving in an out of character way and he said, I think you might be missing your dad. And it was, it was so spot on. But I. Your. Your bonus daughter deserves some props because I’ve always given my father in law credit because he had experience to know what grief looked like. And, and so for somebody to clue you in, it’s helpful, right? It’s helpful because then you can begin to look. So did you reach out and start to work with somebody?

Beth Butram [00:27:58]:
I did, yeah.

Amy Stone [00:28:00]:
Grief is the good thing about therapy and grief is that, and I’m not a grief expert or a therapist is that there are a lot of people who can walk you through helpful tools to process it. It’s like the most, it’s like super researched. There’s a lot of people who can give you. Not all of it works for everybody, but you don’t have to go through it by yourself if you want professional help versus some other things that are more obscure where it’s a little harder to find support. Grief is one is pret. Pretty. Pretty well documented. So I want to thank you for sharing that about the loneliness and that dark moment that cannot have felt good in the car.

Beth Butram [00:28:39]:
It didn’t. And I was much more careful the second time not to get so focused. I tried really hard to keep my mom. You know, luckily I am a little bit older now and so I was able to like try to involve her in some of my friend group activities because, you know, we would just go to dinner or whatever or there would be a card game or whatever and I would host it at my house and have her be part of it and things like that. So that was a much healthier experience. And it really helped at the very end because at least I knew that I had given her as much quality as I could, given her limitations. So that was a real blessing to me. And so I was like, oh, at least I learned something from the first experience in that respect. Yeah.

Amy Stone [00:29:24]:
So you moved your mom first. You moved your. How far away in Illinois was she? How big a move was it?

Beth Butram [00:29:29]:
Four and a half hours due east.

Amy Stone [00:29:32]:
That’s a pretty big move. That’s closing down a house and packing everything up. That’s a pretty big move. And then so when you move her into independent living, which means that she’s totally by herself, she’s making her own food, all of Those kind of things. But then you come to the point of, of the. Where you made the decision to move her into your home.

Beth Butram [00:29:52]:
Yeah, that was because I was picking up all of her groceries at that point. I was making all of her medication runs, I was taking her to all of her doctor appointments. She was getting increasingly less confident driving.

Amy Stone [00:30:09]:
She was actually good news because I think there are a lot of people I know happy driving and they just do not know. They.

Beth Butram [00:30:17]:
Yeah, you got to hide the keys sometimes, man. I’ve heard many of those stories. But you know, she was. She was pretty aware there. She didn’t want to. She never gave up the car. And she did stop driving it eventually altogether. But that was after she was on oxygen 247 because she just wasn’t strong enough to even manipulate the temporary tank. So it was much easier and less stressful on her body to have me cart her around. So that, that worked out for the both of us because I felt safer with her not driving as well. Yeah, yeah. So that was much. But that was much better. And I mean I have still some regrets that, you know, I worked too hard. I was working remotely by that time and I. She was supposed to not pass away until April and so I had a really busy season at work and was devoting a lot of that time while she was in the living room or the bedroom. And and so, you know, I had to deal with that little bit of guilt. But you know that also she had an excellent last day. My brother came for Thanksgiving and we all the grands came. The great grands she got to either see or video with. And she ate pizza and cake and had more food than we’d seen her eat in days and was laughing, had that burst of energy that you hear about all the time.

Amy Stone [00:31:48]:
Yeah, I was. It was in my head. I wasn’t going to say it out loud, but that’s in the TV shows where they have the burst.

Beth Butram [00:31:54]:
Very stereotypical. And it was awesome. And we were like, man, nobody would even like think she had anything wrong other than the oxygen tank. And the next morning she woke up, said she didn’t feel right. And by 11:30 she was gone. And we didn’t see it coming, honestly. But she was ready. She had talked to me about being ready. She was very afraid of a deathbed experience where she would be struggling for breath and didn’t want to go through that because she had a brother in law that had a similar disease called sarcoidosis where he just like struggled for every breath. And that was one of her biggest fears. So God took that from her and gave her a merciful quick.

Amy Stone [00:32:44]:
That’s.

Beth Butram [00:32:45]:
Yeah, I had an excellent day while both of her kids were in the house. So I mean, she couldn’t.

Amy Stone [00:32:51]:
Wow.

Beth Butram [00:32:53]:
I think she chose it.

Amy Stone [00:32:54]:
But yeah, I would like to think that. I would like. There’s no way for us to know, but I would. That’s the way I want to see it too. So would you say in any way, how did becoming a caretaker for your parents in the different roles, did it impact your relationship with them? Because it’s a shift, right? It’s a shift. You go from being the child to being the parent.

Beth Butram [00:33:16]:
And I gotta keep that a lot with my mom because my mom and I were very much my dad. Well, number one, there was dementia involved, so he wasn’t as aware or if he did have some sort of a negative reaction, he usually wasn’t in control of it. It was pretty funny because he never cussed, but he cussed a lot in the last, right before he went non verbal. So that was very interesting.

Amy Stone [00:33:36]:
His personality changed a little bit.

Beth Butram [00:33:38]:
Yes. We tried to turn it into entertainment and it kind of worked out for us. But with my mom, we knew how to push each other’s buttons. We were very close and with that it was. We were almost like sisters more than parent child. And it was funny because, you know, one day you’d wake up and she’d like, can you get me a cup of coffee, honey? I just, I just don’t have it in me. And so then the next day you wake up and you say, hey, mom, I’m going to get you a cup of coffee. And her response would be, what do you think? I can’t get my own cup of coffee. And so you just didn’t know exactly what to do. So there was a lot of give and take there and it could be pretty frustrating, but I can laugh about it now. That’s good. That part of it and then her proclivity to just, you know, just do the opposite of whatever you expected from her was just like right to the very end. So.

Amy Stone [00:34:36]:
Oh my goodness, that is so caregiving. It’s interesting to think about caregiving, right, because caregiving for our small children and our grandchildren, that gets a lot of attention in magazines and newspapers and it’s very noble and there’s all kinds of societal expectations and don’t get me wrong, people judge us no matter what. Like people have opinions about how we’re supposed to do that. But caregiving for our parents is a different Focus. It’s not something that we plan for or that we have sort of. It’s very, very different. You don’t see it in. In as many places. It’s not in movies as much or TV shows or if it is, it’s not very realistic. And I think that it catches a lot of people by surprise.

Beth Butram [00:35:25]:
I agree. And, you know, you think about care a lot of times when you are thinking about a caregiver, you’re thinking about almost like a foster parent type of thing or another form of caregiving is someone who has a child with special needs where you know that the child’s going to need care for the rest of their life.

Amy Stone [00:35:40]:
Forever dependent. Yeah.

Beth Butram [00:35:42]:
Totally different relationship. I think it almost makes it easier in a way because, you know, this is temporary and if you’re handling it’s still frustrating. Get. Don’t get me wrong. I know people get stressed out. They, you know, especially if they’re not caring for themselves. At the same time, it can cause anger, can cause depression. I was very knowledgeable about that, so I kept an eye out for that. More so the second time around than the first time around.

Amy Stone [00:36:09]:
Yeah. Compassion fatigue. Yeah, yeah. Caregiver, Caregiver. Compassion fatigue is. It happens to people who. It happens to nurses and firefighters and social workers, but it also happens to domestic caregivers. And the reality of a domestic caregiver getting. People like people get very, very sick caring for other people, they will neglect themselves and they can get very, very sick. So I think actually you did a very, very good job taking care of.

Beth Butram [00:36:41]:
I had a very supportive husband who was there for me every moment. And so I don’t want to get all over Klempt, but, you know, he’s just a good man, and I would not have come out the same without him. And the kids. I mean, all of the kids rallied and gave me some support. And they knew more about it after my dad passed because after I had healed, I was able to talk about it. I held it all in. That’s another learning lesson, is just don’t hold it all in and don’t think you have to suffer and sacrifice yourself solo that, you know, get the support you need and people will listen. And, you know, I said earlier that I would speak to them ad nauseam, but it was always about my dad. It was never about me or how I was feeling because I had to be the strong one. Well, you don’t have to be the strong one. You can say, hey, I’m really tired today, and I don’t think I could put up with this attitude or, you know, my. When my mom moved in, my. My husband got to see it and he got to see the dynamics between my mother and me. And he’s. He was very surprised because, you know, when she was independent, we would always have very pleasant exchanges. And, you know, we were meeting for dinner and it was just like a visit and a guest host experience. But when she was living in the house, you got the full on, right?

Amy Stone [00:38:05]:
Sure. Oh, it’s so hard. It’s so hard to live with other people. So I think that’s very interesting. So your. Your husband and your kids were actually very supportive. And that I think is interesting is that I believe you. And I. I’m sure that they were fantastic. Even with very supportive, close family, you were still able to put yourself to dig yourself into a hole where you weren’t taking very good care of yourself. And. And it sounds like there was some internal pressure to not share and not ask for help, which I think is really normal. I think is really, really normal. You were in a phase of your life where you’re supposed to be an adult and able to fix things.

Beth Butram [00:38:41]:
Yep. And I needed to be strong and.

Amy Stone [00:38:44]:
Yeah, you wanted to.

Beth Butram [00:38:45]:
Yes.

Amy Stone [00:38:46]:
Yeah. And you wanted to. So. Yeah. So. So how do you think. So you’ve talked to. You’ve talked very openly about the grief, and I think that that’s wonderful. End of life caregiving. It is like a. We know. We know what the end is. But do you think. Do you think that that was. How do you think that played into the eventual grief and passage?

Beth Butram [00:39:11]:
So with my dad, my brother had just started a brand new job and he couldn’t come down. When we got the news that he had stopped swallowing, I went down. I was all alone in a room with him 20 hours a day.

Amy Stone [00:39:29]:
Wow.

Beth Butram [00:39:30]:
And watched him die. And there was nobody in the room with me when. On the day he died and I was playing his favorite music. I was trying to talk about the old times. I didn’t know whether he could hear me or not or understand what I was saying. Although they say hearing is the last thing to go. Just trying to make him as comfortable as I could. But that was traumatic. And so I think that was when I decided that if and when I ever had to go through this with my mom, which at the time, I never even, like, saw it come in.

Amy Stone [00:40:04]:
With my mom, I knew, oh, it hadn’t started yet.

Beth Butram [00:40:07]:
Yeah, it had barely started. And. But I didn’t know it was going to progress the way it did. You can’t tell the future. And so when we realized that my mom had a terminal diagnosis, that’s. I think that was what pushed me because it’s, it’s. It’s another kind of funny, not funny story. My mom had always said while she was living in the apartment, and even beforehand she goes, you know, honey, when it’s time, I don’t want to be a burden. You just tell me and I’ll just go willingly to the nursing home, no worries. Just, you know, I don’t want to be a burden, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because that’s always like her, her go to saying, right, I don’t want to be a bother. I don’t want to be a burden. And when it finally became time, because we tried hospice care in the independent apartment setting, but unfortunately, every time she took her shirt off, she would take her oxygen off. And by the time she got her other shirt or her nightgown on or vice versa, she was incoherent. And then she wouldn’t put her oxygen back on. And then we would fight her on the floor. And I only knew because I was calling her incessantly. And when I wouldn’t get a response, I figured she was passed out and had to get there.

Amy Stone [00:41:23]:
Oh my goodness.

Beth Butram [00:41:24]:
After she did.

Amy Stone [00:41:25]:
That sounds insanely stressful, Beth.

Beth Butram [00:41:28]:
Very awful.

Amy Stone [00:41:29]:
Stressful. Holy cow.

Beth Butram [00:41:31]:
Awful. And so when it happened, but I had to get it documented through the hospice care because she was still being pretty stubborn that she was okay. And so she did it five times in three days. I got it documented. They came and said, look, this is, these are your choices. And so when it came right down to it, her, she looked at me and she says, please don’t send me to the nursing home. And I said, mom, I was never gonna sent you to the nursing home. And she still didn’t want to come to the house because she didn’t want to be a burden. But she came and we made the best of a not great situation. We cleared out a room and so she had a place to have some privacy and we brought her favorite chair and, you know, we tried to make her as comfortable as we could. Got an extra long oxygen cord so she could get all the way to the microwave. We moved the microwave in the kitchen so she could get to it to, you know, warm up food or whatever.

Amy Stone [00:42:31]:
That’s, that’s. I mean, that’s a very good adaptation, but I gotta tell you, it’s not anything I ever would have thought of. But that is, that, that’s. It’s the quality of life, the things aging is not for the faint of heart. You just gotta like, it’s like it changes everything, right? Like so go for the extra long oxygen cord and the put the microwave on wheels, you know, like these are the things. So going back to, we talked about the younger version of you who wanted to grow up and be Beverly Sells. She’s such a great visual. And what you. And that that is not. And that you did not expect that you would spend, what is it, seven years, eight years? How long is. If we add up all the years of caregiving for your parents, how long? How many years?

Beth Butram [00:43:21]:
Almost 10 if you want to.

Amy Stone [00:43:23]:
10 years, 10 years caregiving. You’ve been very sharing about this. It sounds like it was an all encompassing drives to Florida, trips to the grocery store. Really, really intense caregiving. If you were able to go back to that younger version of you and give yourself some advice about preparing for the season of life, of caregiving, what do you think you might share with yourself?

Beth Butram [00:43:46]:
That is an excellent question. I think the lesson I’ve learned through this and through everything else that came with it was give yourself grace and remember that you don’t have to do things alone. It’s. It’s easy to say that you need to be the strong person, but you don’t know who is in your life that will help you if you don’t ask for help. And so I think that’s pretty much the gist of it.

Amy Stone [00:44:17]:
That’s 100% the other thing that I say. So these are not my words actually. Brene Brown is like, when you tell your story, it gives other people permission to know their way in. And that has mirrored my experience in my life. People know about my family so they will tell me about their family, that kind of thing. And when you were telling the story about feeling alone in the car, I was thinking to myself, like I was thinking to myself, wow, like, if I hadn’t talked to you for 15 years and you had called me, I would like to think that I would be the person that would have been like, I will listen for 12 hours while you drive home, you know, but you. They don’t. One of the challenges is that if we don’t know what other people have gone through, we don’t know who’s safe to share with. Because these are hard things. Right. And I see this in all different kinds of things. It’s like, you know, when you want to quit your job, you obviously don’t walk in and tell your boss when you’re first Thinking about it.

Beth Butram [00:45:08]:
Right.

Amy Stone [00:45:08]:
You got to find that other friend who’s already done it, who’s going to listen to you, who’s a safe space. And that has gotten harder, I think, over the last. I don’t even know how to how many years. It’s harder to figure out because we live in very isolated sort of ways, even though we’re connected 24 hours, 365 days a year. And that’s very connected to the project that you and Bea are working on. So in a minute, we’re going to wrap this up, but I do want to give you a chance to talk about Social Leopards, which is the project that you guys are working on.

Beth Butram [00:45:44]:
Sure. So Social Leopards is a podcast born of several conversations. My best friend Bea and I. Bea is currently caregiving for both of her parents, and her situation has changed recently. And then her mom just had a stroke. So that’s the update there. But we have supported each other for some time. So we were talking about how we could share just kind of our thoughts and how we could help others. And loneliness is so prevalent, and it’s, you know, they talk about how it’s an epidemic and so social leopards. Leopards are very solitary creatures, but I didn’t know that.

Amy Stone [00:46:30]:
That’s why the leopards was in the name. Okay, yes.

Beth Butram [00:46:32]:
So. So a leopard is a very solitary creature, and it’s in the jungle and it’s everywhere, but you never see it. And you, you know, you. You don’t get a glimpse. So a social leopard is someone who’s lonely, who is probably right there in your life, who you don’t even recognize is there because they’re either masking or, you know, hiding the fact that they’re actually lonely. So you don’t know who around you might be experiencing loneliness. So a lot of what we talk about is, you know, being aware and being recognizing. We want to help people who are lonely and don’t have some sort of other condition, like, you know, they don’t have severe social anxiety or depression that’s preventing them from going out and trying, but maybe they just don’t feel confident. So confidence builders, things like that. Kind of the pop psychology part of it, but the. On the reverse side, it’s about recognizing others in your life who may be accepted, experiencing these things and just don’t feel comfortable making the first move and how it can make a difference. And I think I’ve said at least 10 times on this podcast, don’t judge a book by its cover.

Amy Stone [00:47:39]:
Yeah.

Beth Butram [00:47:39]:
Because you don’t know that person’s story. And you said something similar. You know, you have to have the comfort level to share your story with someone in order to really feel heard. And if you’re around people who are not really listening to you, then you’re not going to benefit from a true friendship. So, absolutely. It’s on. It’s kind of like circular conversation that we have on those topics and the various reasons that people experience loneliness, including caregiving. We did one episode that focused in on my dad long time ago. But, you know, it’s. It’s just everyone has its. There’s so many. It’s like you could pick up a grain of sand on the beach and never run out of reasons why people experience loneliness and how they overcame it.

Amy Stone [00:48:28]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And you shed light on something. It’s like, we all know how to be social and we all know how to make friends, and it is this. But doing it as an adult is a slightly different experience than kindergarten. All right, so now we’re going to close out with three questions. Okay. They’re rapid fire. They’re random. They’re not related to the interview. They’re not related to caregiving or grief. They’re just for fun.

Beth Butram [00:48:57]:
Okay.

Amy Stone [00:48:58]:
They’re just for fun. All right. What is one way that you do something special for yourself as a treat or a reward? Reward.

Beth Butram [00:49:05]:
Ice cream.

Amy Stone [00:49:06]:
Ice cream. What flavor?

Beth Butram [00:49:08]:
Oh, usually peanut butter swirl or caramel.

Amy Stone [00:49:12]:
Oh, very good. Do you. Is it like. Do you go. Is this like grocery store ice cream or do you go to a culver’s?

Beth Butram [00:49:17]:
I mean, like the frozen.

Amy Stone [00:49:19]:
Frozen castor.

Beth Butram [00:49:20]:
Be a pint. I try not to buy the whole health get half gallon because I’ll eat it.

Amy Stone [00:49:24]:
It’s a single serving. Yeah, it’s just any. Any container of ice cream can be considered a single serving. That is. It’s a rule from my father. The gospel according to Jim. It’s not a good rule, but I.

Beth Butram [00:49:35]:
Will keep that one in mind in case I got to pull it out and use it.

Amy Stone [00:49:38]:
His favorite was the, like, little. The little Pines of Ben and Jerry’s when I was a kid. He was so frustrated by those because he was like, why do they say that? This is like. It’s like 8 servings or something ridiculous in there. And he’s like, how this is not eight servings. This is one. This is like a scoop of ice cream in a container. He would rant, anyway. That is. All right. I’m not good at the brief and rapid fire questions, obviously. Okay, what is. What is your favorite holiday or holiday celebration that you look forward to every year?

Beth Butram [00:50:08]:
Christmas. Because, like, spoil the lemon daylights out of my kids. And now it has shifted to my grandchildren.

Amy Stone [00:50:16]:
And you love it. That’s spectacular. All right. Are you a person who likes to get dressed up and be stylish and fashionable and formal or costumes or anything for events, or are you a person who prefers casual and relaxed outfits no matter where you go?

Beth Butram [00:50:31]:
Casual and relaxed outfits to the greatest extent possible? I am anti heels. I am anti makeup. I am anti fancy.

Amy Stone [00:50:42]:
Very good. All right. That’s it. Beth Buttram, thank you so much for being an amazing guest today.

Beth Butram [00:50:48]:
Thank you so much.