The Burden of Trying to Save Your Mother

Sharon is a 43 year-old social worker for the New York Department of the Aging. When I met her at the entrance to the senior center, she seemed rather cold. She was trying to control a flood of emotion: She started to cry as soon as she sat down.

Sharon explained that her mother died about 6 months ago. Her guilt was evident immediately. She feels that she should have been there every day, even though her mother lived in another state and her sister lived nearby.

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One morning Sharon's sister Joan called her mother and there was no answer. When she rushed to her house, she found that her mother couldn’t get out of bed. She couldn’t move; she had a severe kidney infection and it caused terrible back pain. Soon after her mother was hospitalized she became depressed. Sharon decided to ask her mother’s doctor to prescribe anti-depressants. Her mother came home from the hospital and stayed with Joan for a few days and then went back to her condominium. Sharon went down to stay with her and talked to her about assisted living.

Sharon soon found a beautiful assisted living facility with different levels of care for her mother and she was doing pretty well. Sharon drove from New York to Pennsylvania to visit her every few weeks and stayed several days each time. Then her mother had two falls; she was having some issues with balance and it wasn’t clear why. Sharon got her mother a walker and thought that was really positive, but then her mother started showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

Sharon was sobbing when she explained that her mother got up in the middle of the night, climbed over the bed’s protective bar, only to fall and smash her pelvis. The physician said it was so severe she’d never walk again. Sharon’s mother became increasingly confused and lost more and more weight. At this point in the interview, Sharon was crying so hard that she could hardly speak.

I was struck by Sharon’s feeling that she could have saved her mother. I pointed out to her that she seems to blame herself for something she could not have possibly known. After all, she had spent a lot of time and energy finding her mother an appropriate place to recuperate and researching the pros and cons of Aricept.

Although Sharon is a social worker and does counseling, she does not see that her childhood experience has affected her. Her mother had a long history of heart problems; throughout her childhood, Sharon feared her mother was going to die. The little girl in her was still desperate to keep her mother alive. Sharon feels like a failure because her mother died. She failed at her raison d’etre—saving her mother.

Sharon knows that she has always felt responsible for her mother in a way her sister and brother did not. She spent her childhood feeling responsible for keeping her mother alive. That is a huge responsibility for a child; it is both a terrible burden and a special position of power. Sharon’s sense of self was built around being a powerful caregiver: Perhaps that had something to do with her choice of profession.

Sharon feels that as an expert in her field she should have been able to save her mother. Her sense of being able to take care of other people was based on her feeling of potency from caring for her mother. Being unable to save her mother strikes at the heart of Sharon’s sense of self. She has not only lost her mother, but her image of herself. Sadly, Sharon told me that for the last six months she’s been wondering about whether she wants to leave the field of gerontology.

She is clinically depressed as a result of her guilt. She feels that she should have known that the medicine could cause dizziness. She imagines people must think she’s a terrible social worker because she made that decision. Her friends and siblings try to offer support and assure her that her mother's death was not her fault. But the seeds of her guilt go back to childhood and Sharon needs professional help to understand it and help find a way to forgive herself for not being able to save her mother.