Kitty Eisele considered it an honor to care for her father Al during his final years of life. The veteran NPR reporter suspected that his physical decline would quicken after her mother passed in 2016, and she tried to brace herself for the challenge.
It was her way of honoring her beloved father, who was a legend in Washington, D.C. journalism circles. Growing up, she observed the respect and admiration Al Eisele cultivated, and wanted to pay it forward. But the physical decline from heart failure, the deepening disorientation and frequent falls became too much for Eisele to handle.
Her experience led to the launch of the award-winning “24/7: A Podcast About Caregiving.” Here are some quotes from Eisele’s session with National Press Foundation journalists during the “America’s Long-Term Care Crisis” fellowship program:
“My dad was a long-time journalist in DC and also worked in policy and worked in the White House briefly, but he started The Hill newspaper about 20 years ago. And so pre-Internet, the only way you could get news was to go meet people in person. I think he knew everybody in town. I run into people who do shoeshines and are bartenders and taxi drivers. People knew who my dad was. I liked him and I got along with him. Having a journalist in the family made my own life more easy to explain, I think.”
“My dad was hospitalized in the summer of ’17 with severe heart failure. We knew he had that. After that everything became chaos. It took a while to get him settled. After a three-week hospitalization, we got him restored.”
“If you cover this, you know often when you’re hospitalized you go to a step-down or a rehab space for a while to get your physical capabilities back, but it was clear after that that he wasn’t going to be necessarily fully in his own mind well enough to operate at home. He thought he was, but it became very clear that there were cognitive issues caused by lack of oxygen to the brain.”
“Well, he went on for three more years and then we hit COVID. So I signed up for something I wasn’t aware of, and even though we’d been through a lot of crises, I just didn’t know how hard this can become and physically challenging, mentally and emotionally. very challenging for me as well as for him. We hired an in-house caregiver for maybe 15 hours a week for the first year. It very quickly became clear I could not do this.”
“I often tell people, you think one person can take care of a baby or a toddler, and that’s generally possible to get a toddler into a car seat. But I was dealing with a 180-pound man who often fell, couldn’t get up, tried to get out of bed at night, would bang into something. I would find out 20 minutes later when I’d hear him banging his cane, he’s on the floor. I can’t right him. I get injured trying to do it. I’m calling 911 or the neighbors in the middle of the night, “Help me get him back to bed.”
“As I went through this, I thought, I’m so alone. There are so many people I know doing this, but I just feel without a compass, without very clear navigable instructions for how you plan for not just death, but that interim period where you’re not able to care for yourself.”
“I was feeling so sad, to be honest. I didn’t know I was so depressed. I thought I was managing this stuff, but I also felt like I don’t have a lot to show for this time. If I’m a journalist, shouldn’t I make something out of this? Because all my friends are asking me for the same questions, the same advice. Why can’t we find more structured and obvious help?”
“I started just taping with my phone, not even a tape deck because I don’t do a lot of field taping, little incidents with my dad and what I was doing to care for him. I purposely decided not to expose him very much and to focus the story about the caregiver. Not that I was so important, but I didn’t want my dad’s disabilities or his frailty or his dignity to really be challenged by exposing things. I had a good set of boundaries and I think he understood, too.”
Access the full transcript here.
The America’s Long-Term Care Crisis Fellowship is sponsored by AARP, which also sponsors the AARP Award for Excellence in Journalism on Aging, accepting applications until Oct. 16. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
