{"id":763,"date":"2017-04-21T08:48:52","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T08:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/?p=763"},"modified":"2025-06-02T22:09:02","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T22:09:02","slug":"colleenkavanaugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/21\/colleenkavanaugh\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s In A Name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Colleen<\/em><\/p>\n

For my guest, Colleen Kavanaugh, being a working mother, a daughter, and a partner\u00a0are\u00a0a few\u00a0of the identities she’s comfortable with. But, when taking on the heavy responsibilities of advocating for a mom with Stage-4 breast cancer and a dad with Alzheimer\u2019s and Parkinson\u2019s, she wasn\u2019t quite ready to add \u201ccaregiver\u201d to the list. \u00a0The result was a situation where\u00a0she\u00a0ended up\u00a0doing everything\u00a0on her own, with no safety net of support.\u00a0Sound familiar? Founder of\u00a0The Longest Dance<\/strong>\u00a0,<\/a> both a certified caregiving consultant and a certified dementia communication specialist,\u00a0Colleen is also a\u00a0daughter who has walked a mile in many of our shoes.\u00a0I\u2019m so pleased to share her story and the powerful lessons she\u2019s learned in this first of a two-part interview.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

What were the circumstances in which you found yourself in the role of caregiver? <\/strong><\/b>This question always puts a line from The Talking Heads song, Once In A Lifetime<\/em> into my head, \u201cAnd you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?\u201d During my decade of caregiving I asked myself that question, in David Byrne singsong cadence, over and over again. Caregiving was certainly never an activity on my list of things to do, that\u2019s for certain. I look at my tenure as a family caregiver as what insurance policies call an \u201cAct of God\u201d, like a storm that you hear happening to other towns but never yours. My parents were diagnosed with diseases and needed care. Period. No choice. No picking what is behind door #2 after door #1 had been opened. To reductively sum up my caregiving storm in one run-on sentence\u2026. I was a 34-year old newly divorced parent of a toddler, working full time when I began caring for my mom who was diagnosed (and lived a prognosis defying 3 years) with stage-4 breast cancer and within 9 months of her dying, I began caring for my widowed dad who was diagnosed with Alzheimer\u2019s and Parkinson\u2019s diseases, all the while attempting to live my own life (which now included a new partner and his two children) while dismantling my parent\u2019s very complicated lives.In the midst of it, not unlike being in the middle of a catastrophic storm, I was unable to control the forecast (the diagnosis), but only able to control how I dealt with storm prep and clean up.<\/p>\n

What was the most\u00a0difficult part of caregiving? Was there a positive side to it? If so, please describe. <\/strong><\/b>The most difficult part of caregiving, for me, was acknowledging that I was a caregiver. This denial was detrimental to my getting the support I should have gotten in order to manage the stress that I wore around my neck like an invisible barnacle. Even during the times when a parent\u2019s care consumed my life, I was still a mother, partner, daughter, employee, volunteer and active daydreamer. I think part of denying my role was that I ultimately did not want to be doing what I was doing. And what I was ultimately doing was watching my parents die from terminal, degenerative illnesses. Who wants \u201cDeath Sherpa<\/em>\u201d on their business card? I certainly didn\u2019t. That said, the flip side of my business card would have read, \u201cLife Igniter<\/em>\u201d because, amid the intensity of the worries, endless to-do\u2019s, and perpetual grieving, I truly learned how to live. I met death close up and it whispered to me that I needed to make the most of the unknown time I have left. The intensity of emotions and situations that exist within caregiving are a nonstop roller coaster ride of grueling climbs to a pinnacle that once reached, hurl you off the top into a descent that you can not prevent, control, or escape. It\u2019s nausea inducing at first but slowly, over time, it becomes your new normal and you are no longer getting motion sick at each free fall (or in a caregiver\u2019s case, each health decline, hospital visit, 911 call, or middle of the night crisis). When my caregiving ride was finally over, I knew I could not just walk away from all that I had learned. If an ounce of my experience could be of value to another family caregiver, I needed to share it and give others the practical support and encouragement I so often wished I had, but didn\u2019t know I needed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Please come back for Part 2 of our interview\u00a0on Friday, April\u00a028th. In the meantime,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>be\u00a0sure to check out Colleen’s\u00a0website<\/a><\/strong> to learn more about the\u00a0services she\u00a0offers to caregivers, and sign up to receive some valuable\u00a0(and free) organizational tools\u00a0for making\u00a0life a bit easier.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my guest, Colleen Kavanaugh, being a working mother, a daughter, and a partner\u00a0are\u00a0a few\u00a0of the identities she’s comfortable with. But, when taking on the heavy responsibilities of advocating for a mom with Stage-4 breast cancer and a dad with Alzheimer\u2019s and Parkinson\u2019s, she wasn\u2019t quite ready to add \u201ccaregiver\u201d to the list. \u00a0The result […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":773,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":46,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":831,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions\/831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithdhenry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}