Caregiving Author, Rick Lauber: "This Surprised Me!"

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Call 866-WINASIA or to see chickens and other animals to donate, go to crittercampaign.org. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. I am Peter Rosenberger, and this is the show for you as a family caregiver. So four caregivers, about caregivers, hosted by a caregiver, and we're glad you're with us. I've got a guest on the phone, and John, here's the setup, okay? He introduced himself when he told me about his book, and he said, Canadians guide to caregiving.

He's from Canada, but I didn't understand it. I was in the car, and I didn't have a real good connection, and I thought he said, the comedians guide to caregiving. And I thought, well, he had me there, and then I asked him, I said, do you have a hitchhiker's guide to caregiving, a caregiver's guide to the galaxy?

And I thought, well, we're going to have this gal. And I know that's one of your thanks, goodbye, so long, and thanks for all the fish. I know that's one of your favorite books. Absolutely. Oh, I love that series of books. Fantastic. But this is Rick Lauber, and Rick is our neighbor to the north of us here, and I'm a little closer to him than you are, I think, John, being in Montana.

Yeah, significantly so, yeah. He's in Alberta, and he's got a book out, and he's been a prolific writer. He's had contributions in Chicken Soup for the Soul and some other things he's done. But he caredgiving for both parents, and just had some insights, and you know, the Canadians are so nice, John. They're so polite.

Well, that's a stereotype, and I won't stand for that sort of bias on this network. Well, Rick, we're glad to have you, eh? It's my pleasure to join you both.

Thank you very much for having me on. Well, we're thrilled to have you, and you are in Alberta, which is just north of us, I believe, correct? In Montana?

That's correct. It's pretty much straight north of you. What's the weather like up there? We're cold today. We've got 20 degrees and some snow.

What do you got? We're at about minus 25. That's Celsius.

We've got some snow as well, so it's frosty, yeah. I could never do Celsius. John, can you do Celsius?

I can do it when it's negative 40, because it's the same in both directions. Well, this may not mean much to you, Rick, but one time I was skiing over in western North Carolina with the youth group when I was growing up. I grew up in that part of the country, and we went, this is a long time ago, and we're staying at this campground thing with the youth group, and all we could get was a little AM station up there in Boone, North Carolina area, way up in the mountains, just AM country station. The guy comes on, and he says, we got the weather report for you. It's cold out there. Here's Mel Tillis. That was it. That was the weather report.

It's cold out there, boys, but we're glad to have you with us. Tell us a little bit about your journey as a caregiver, and we'll get into your books and so forth, and I want to just kind of unpack your story and some things you've learned along the way. My pleasure. I was a former co-caregiver for both my parents. Mom at the time had Parkinson's and leukemia. Dad had the early stages of Alzheimer's, so I worked with my two sisters collectively to care for them simultaneously. I don't know whether that was a blessing or a curse, but all of that caregiving was very new to me. I was completely unprepared to step into those shoes, but I did what I had to do.

A number of different newfound responsibilities took on. I helped move Mom and Dad repeatedly. I looked after the banking. I paid their monthly bills. I shuttled them to doctor's appointments. I eventually became Dad's joint guardian and alternate trustee and ended up making many decisions for him.

It was a journey. If you could pinpoint one thing that you said, you said you were unprepared, and most of us are. In fact, I haven't met any caregiver yet that was prepared, but what was one thing that really caught you off guard?

Wow, I am woefully unprepared for this. One thing, wow. I just say not looking ahead, not thinking proactively. Rather, I was thinking reactively rather than proactively. I always thought that Mom and Dad were the pictures of good health, and they were, but they ended up growing older.

They got sicker, and I hadn't really envisioned them ever growing old and declining as they did, so that caught me off guard. Well, you said one of the things that you did during this, and I assumed beforehand, but it really took off, was your writing through this process. You seem to be a pretty voracious writer. Talk a little bit about that.

Sure. I've always enjoyed writing, and others have told me that I've been good at it. I ended up using writing during my caregiving years, especially during the later years when Mom and Dad got older and declined further. Writing was a coping mechanism for me. I used it to help me get through those dark times and to deal with what was going on. It provided me a safe outlet as to talk about my thoughts, my feelings, and my experience. Was it kind of like journaling?

It was to a certain degree. There was journaling. There were articles and stories that I ended up submitting to a local senior's newspaper, and I was lucky enough to get published. I just wrote on anything that was going on, different issues that I was feeling. After Mom and Dad died, I just kept writing, and I kept thinking to myself, there has to be something to this.

I'm not the only person dealing with caregiving, or nor will I ever be, and what else can I do with that? My journaling became the platforms for my first book that turned into my second book as well. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Caregiver's Guide for Comedians. When you said this, I really thought The Caregiver's Guide for Comedians, and I really thought we had a winner there. I thought, okay, now this is something. No, I'm just kidding.

It made me laugh, though, when you said that, and I had to do a double take on it because I thought that was funny. You got a pretty wicked sense of humor. Who else puts a picture of them on their website with a red nose and everything else?

I was going to say clown nose. Like, really? Straight up.

All right, I'll take a look at that. Were you able to keep a sense of humor while taking care of your folks? Yes, I did. I learned that laughter was an important part of it.

Caregiving is an important and serious topic, and I approached it seriously as well. But there were times that I had to laugh, and I did laugh at what was going on. That felt good, to be honest with you. You have to laugh because not everything is completely in your control, nor will it ever be. Sometimes you just have to let it go and say, this is beyond my control.

I can't do anything about it. So, you end up laughing it off. I've done that over the years, and sometimes I think fellow caregivers need permission to laugh. It sounds like you're the kind of guy that helps them do that, and that's something we've been working here on this show to do. It's to let them know it's okay, that there are things that are hilariously funny. You're not disrespecting the suffering.

You're just simply living life, and you're just being a normal human being. But I had a caller call into my show the other day, and she called me Dr. Rosenberger. When your last name's Rosenberger, and you can speak medical-ese, and you've been a caregiver now in my 35th year, and I'm around a lot of hospitals and doctors, yeah, you're going to get called Dr. Rosenberger. I remember one time I was checking Gracie into the hospital, and I was going over her chart with the nurse, but I was wearing a suit at the time, and I was using my official, hey, I'm a caregiver voice, you know, kind of thing. Right. And for whatever reason, and I can't.

I mean, I could turn it on if I have to. And the nurse, she said, are you a doctor? And without even missing a beat, I said cranial proctology, and I just kept going, and I didn't stop.

She kind of looked at me real funny and then just wrote it down and kept going. And so from here on out, I'm a Peter Rosenberger cranial proctologist, you know, and I help people get their heads out of the wheel. But it's, you know, and those are moments that I've come to just find, you know, it's okay. We've got to laugh a little bit. We have to. We're human beings. We'll cry. We cry plenty of tears. You have.

I have. But, you know, do we give it. Allowing yourself to laugh like you pointed out is an important way to look at it. You know, I remember a quick story. I remember one time I was visiting my mother, and, you know, she ended up falling in her living room and, you know, immediately rushed to her. I was concerned. I helped her up. But, you know, she had been flailing around on the floor like an overturned turtle. And, you know, had it turned out when we got her up, I mean, she was fine. And we ended up both laughing about it because it was completely out of our control. And you have to laugh.

You have to let that go. Well, when you set out to write these books, you started putting together some things. Like you said, you were writing and writing and writing. What surprised you in a positive way about yourself through this that you discovered some skill sets, besides writing, that you may not have known you had before? That caregiving brought out of you?

What surprised you about yourself? And by the way, if you've noticed, we don't rehearse questions here. So, I put you right on the spot.

I've noticed that. You're asking me questions, so thank you. We don't rehearse anything here. Peter and I had a 15-second conversation on like Tuesday. John, are you here? Okay, let's go.

You know, but we're caregivers. So, I like just to throw it out there and say, you know, you found yourself in this crucible. And you look at yourself in the mirror and you said, here's something about myself that's a positive thing that I didn't really cherish or know that I had or maybe value as much as I value now.

What would that be? I think one of the things I learned was what I was capable of in a difficult situation. And I'm pretty proud of myself for what I accomplished during all of that time. You know, another thing that comes to mind is, you know, becoming the adult in the relationship and making those key decisions, those crucial decisions for my dad. I know dad, you know, with his Alzheimer's, I mean, he became a child and he became completely unable to, you know, to make those key decisions. So, you know, I had to step in and, you know, make those choices for him a lot of times.

You know, so yeah, it was, you know, I was surprised, I was pleasantly surprised as to what I could do and what I could achieve and what I ended up doing for my mom and dad. You know, that may be one of the most cherished answers I've gotten from any guest because one of the issues, and John will back you up, back me up on this. One of the issues we have struggled with with so many in this audience is that they're not proud of themselves.

They find things to destroy themselves with, to criticize themselves with. And I love the way you said, I was very proud of myself that I stepped up and did this. What a beautiful testimony of that and I think that, I hope you will share that over and over and over again with fellow caregivers, particularly men.

Because you, as a male caregiver, you know that men, men approach this from a different perspective and so many beat the crap out of themselves over everything they failed at. I mean, listen, if I wanted you and I to list our failures, we'd be here all day. Absolutely.

Because we're going to fail, but I love that. John, your thoughts on that? No, well, and the thing that I, that is the primary point I was wanting to make, but something else, because you did it so, you comment on that so beautifully, Peter, but the idea of being proud of it. Don't get used to the phrase, all right?

There's no way. But the phrase that you used, becoming the adult in the situation, that struck me, that really resonated in a way that I think a lot of people can also kind of try to, and getting through that entire idea of, oh no, how to, I'm the adult now with my parent and that is a, and making all those decisions and commenting on that was I think something very valuable. And I just wanted to highlight that a little bit, you know?

Well, and one more question, Rick. Your sisters, how did your relationship change with your sisters? Did you guys grow tighter together? Was it, you know, I know that there's never going to be a smooth, you're always going to have bumps in the road, but do you feel like you guys were able to work together pretty well and grow together as siblings? Or how did that work? There were some skirmishes, but no full out wars.

No knives in the back. We worked fairly well together and fairly cohesively. You know, I'm not going to say there weren't any arguments because there were. But, you know, I think, I wouldn't believe you if you told me there weren't any arguments, but yeah, that's life. I think what helped us in the long run was communication. We spoke with each other, we talked with each other fairly often and fairly regularly. And I think we remembered who we were working for. You know, it wasn't us that we were working for. It was mom and dad. And we tried to keep mom and dad's mind in front of mine. Beautifully said.

Beautifully said. Rick Lauber from Alberta, Canada. His book, both books are available out there right now.

You can go to RickLauber.com, R-I-C-K-L-A-U-B-E-R.com, Caregiver's Guide for Canadians and The Successful Caregiver's Guide. Both available now and other things that he's written. Rick, I want you to know how much I appreciate you coming on the show. I really do. Thank you for this. I appreciate the time. Thank you very much to you both.

Yes, sir. This is Hope for the Caregiver. We'll be right back. This is Peter Rosenberger. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers. Don't go away. We'll be right back.