This is what my week looks like. PawPaw — my father-in-law, 79, twenty years of Parkinson's — lives at the bottom of our driveway. I take him to physical therapy five days a week. Choir on Mondays. Church on Sundays. The neurologist at Emory in Atlanta. The primary care doctor. The foot doctor. The dermatologist. The dentist. The haircut. I help him with his socks and shoes most mornings and check behind him on his medications. The boys spend every Friday night at his place. Two family dinners a week. Dinner out once or twice a week.
That is what the week looks like. Every week. And PawPaw doesn't always make it easy — he walks without his walker, goes barefoot despite the neuropathy, skips medications. Some weeks are harder than others. All of them require showing up.
I'm telling you this because I want you to know I'm not writing from theory. Caring for an elderly parent is genuinely hard, and anyone who makes it sound otherwise is either not doing it or not being honest about what it costs.
What Actually Makes It Hard
The accumulation. No single thing in elderly care is usually overwhelming. It's the accumulation — the appointments compound with the medication management compound with the physical care compound with the emotional weight compound with your own life continuing to require your attention. Caregivers don't burn out because of one terrible day. They burn out because of five hundred ordinary days that each took a little more than they gave back.
The resistance. PawPaw is not trying to make my life harder. But he walks past the walker, and I know what a fall means at 79 with Parkinson's. The gap between what you'd do and what they choose to do is a constant source of low-grade anxiety that doesn't resolve.
The grief running alongside everything else. PawPaw lost his wife Loretta in a car accident on their anniversary. He was driving. He carries that. Caregiving involves watching someone you love change in ways that don't change back.
The invisibility. Nobody sees the 7am sock-and-shoe routine. Nobody sees the medication double-check. The work is constant and largely unwitnessed, which is part of what makes it lonely.
What Actually Helps
Design the situation, not just manage it. The compound arrangement — PawPaw at the bottom of the driveway, us at the top — was a deliberate design choice. Thirty yards of separation gives us both something: he keeps his independence; we can be there in sixty seconds. Sustainable caregiving usually has a design underneath it.
Get other people genuinely involved. The PT team knows PawPaw's exercise capacity better than I do. The boys' Friday nights are care too. Sustainable caregiving distributes itself.
Find the meaning in the work itself. I have learned more from caring for PawPaw than I learned from ten years of running a home care company. Finding that meaning — not denying the difficulty but finding what's real underneath it — is what makes it possible to keep going.
It's hard. You're allowed to say so. And then get the help you need to keep showing up.
Chip Mitchell spent over 10 years owning and operating a home care company in Northwest Georgia. He currently cares for his father-in-law, PawPaw, who has lived with Parkinson's Disease for 20 years.
About Chip Mitchell
Chip Mitchell is the founder of Growing Gray USA. With over a decade of experience owning a home care company, he has helped hundreds of families navigate the complexities of caring for aging parents.
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