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Long Distance Caregiving for a Loved One is Particularly Difficult

The phone rang at 5 a.m. John was sure it couldn’t be good news at that hour. He was right. Mom’s neighbors were calling him from 850 miles away in Texas to say that she was out watering her roses an hour ago on a cold, early spring morning. John knew that she had been failing. She wasn’t same Mom he could always count to stand by him. Now he needed to stand by her. But how?

Families are now living further apart from each other. This is difficult because your elders require ever-increasing assistance, yet distance between you makes it difficult to perform tasks of a primary caregiver. But most elders are reluctant to leave their home of many years to move to town in which their adult children live. This reluctance can become a stressful point of contention between adult children and their parent(s).

Wisconsin author LeAnn R. Ralph remembers it very well.

"When I was growing up on our dairy farm forty years ago, stores didn't put up Christmas displays until day after Thanksgiving. No one was really thinking about Christmas shopping before that," Ralph said. "In fact, my mother felt so strongly about it that she didn't even like to hear word 'Christmas' until after we had finished eating Thanksgiving dinner."

Ralph's new book, Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin Farm), celebrates Christmas during that simpler time.

"Back then, happiness was baking cookies, decorating Christmas tree, and eating lefse that my mother had made," Ralph said.

Lefse (pronounced lef'suh) is a flat potato pastry brought to this country by Norwegian immigrants who settled in Wisconsin. Ralph's mother was daughter of Norwegian immigrants, and their 120-acre family farm was homesteaded by Ralph's great-grandfather.

"When I was a kid, people enjoyed simple pleasures. The Sunday school Christmas program was an event at little country church just down road from our farm that was attended by nearly everyone in neighborhood," Ralph noted.

"At time, if someone had told me Christmas season was going to change so drastically that you would eventually get Christmas catalogs in mail in August and September — and that you would find Christmas decorations on sale in August and September, too — I wouldn't have believed it," she said.

"I also would have never thought that dairy farming would change so much. I always took it for granted that we lived in 'America's Dairyland,' but today, most of small family dairy farms have disappeared," Ralph noted.

According to statistics from United States Census of Agriculture , Wisconsin has lost two-thirds of its dairy farms since 1969. Forty years ago, Wisconsin had 60,000 dairy farms. Today, only about 20,000 dairy farms remain.