Caregiving can feel like a heavy journey, but it’s also a path filled with love, learning, and connection. Today, I’m joined by Brenda Marie Sheldrake, who shares her deeply personal story of caring for her father during his final years. Brenda’s experience reminds us that even when we face tough decisions, we can approach them with empathy and respect for our loved ones. She offers insightful advice on how to balance the need for help with preserving dignity, and how to create meaningful memories along the way. If you're navigating similar challenges, Brenda encourages you not to do it alone—reach out for support, and know that you’re not the only one walking this path.

About Our Guest: 

Brenda Marie Sheldrake, an award-winning entrepreneur and best-selling author, empowers entrepreneurs through community, coaching, and courses. With 13 years in community health, she led anti-oppression training and inclusivity initiatives. A 2022 Woman of Worth honoree, Brenda believes, “Relationship building creates lasting leads and clients.” Her mantra: “Don’t quit—your dreams will materialize.” She’s dedicated to fostering connections and entrepreneurial success.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brenda-marie-sheldrake/

About Me:

I have cared for many family members across the life span, experiencing the joys and challenges of child-rearing, the poignance of caring for parents, friends, and elder partners. I realized that I could not handle the stress of family caregiving 24/7/365. It was time for a new approach to caring. My health and happiness were slipping away. This is how Think to Thrive for Caregivers evolved. Let your mind meet your heart so you don’t lose track of your life.

Connect with Me:

https://www.deborahgreenhut.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahgreenhut01/

Find my books here

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Hi. It's a pleasure to be with you today. My guest is Brenda Marie Sheldrake, and she has a caregiving story for us and a lot of other good information besides. So Brenda, I'm going to give you a minute to introduce yourself, and then we'll get right to our conversation.

Brenda Marie Sheldrake: Okay, sounds good. So my name is Brenda Marie Sheldrake, and I live in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, and my story is a Canadian story. So for any of you who are Canadian out there, I can what I'm sharing is my Canadian experience. For those of you who are any place else in the world, I think that if you just sit back and listen to my story from your heart, you're going to hear that it is relevant to anybody anywhere in the world.

I would agree with that. I have a feeling that this is a it may be an international phenomenon, but it's one very close to many people's hearts, because, as Rosalynn Carter once said, we're all either going to need or be a caregiver before it's over. So everyone's got the experience to look back at at some point. So Brenda, tell me about your caregiving experience. Let's get right to it.

Brenda Marie Sheldrake: Okay, well, I think I've always had the heart of a caregiver. I've always liked to help people live, always, you know when, when people expressed a challenge or something that they needed? I've always been one of the first people to stick up my hand and say, Okay, how can I help? Are you moving? Okay, let me help you move. Do you need a ride? Okay, let me give you a ride. But my caregiving role really jumped to the forefront about three years ago. My father was 80 years old and still very active and and out there and independent, he's living on his own. Had a great big house that he took care of with a huge yard, and he was an avid gardener. And one day, he lifted a very big pot, and it was full of flowers, and he just watered it, and the next thing we knew, he was on the ground, well, required a hospital visit with dad, saying, I'm okay, I'm okay, everything's fine. We'll get over this. But he still put him into a hospital visit, and the hospital visit resulted in a diagnosis of sciatic nerve damage. Now the doctor said it's all going to be okay. It'll heal. Your dad just needs a little bit of extra help with some of the heavier lifting. Because remember I said big house, big yard. Okay. Well, Dad also had big vision. The yard needed to mow every week. And not only did it meeting to be mowed every week, my dad believed that you mowed the lawn, cross hatched like a golf course in different directions every time you mowed it, it took about two hours with a push more, because you don't ride that's not going to give you a quality cut. That's just one of the challenges he was faced with. And when my sister and I said, Dad, let us come and help you. My 80 year old dad bristled up, puffed right up, and said, I don't need anybody's help. I've been fine so long. I'm fine now. So my sister and I worked out a system for doing this, and any of your listeners who are trying to figure out how to give that extra help to your family member who isn't totally incapacitated yet. Here's my tip. I would call my dad on a Friday night and I would say, Dad, I'm thinking of coming for dinner. I haven't seen you for a little while. Said, Okay, if I pop by. And he would go, Well, I suppose we could have dinner. You know, be nice for you, because I know you're lonely while your husband's working. And I would go to the house, and I would come with a small suitcase, and I would say, you know, long drive, dad. I think that I'm going to stay overnight. And since it was Friday night, I would stay overnight. We would have a nice dinner, we'd spend a little bit of time together. And Saturday morning, I'd get up early, bright and sunny, and I'd go out there, and I'd cut that lawn. And when dad woke up, he'd come trundling out to the kitchen, look out the back door, and there I'd be out there on the lawn, pushing the lawnmower back and forth, cutting it the right way, or he'd be standing on the porch telling me I was cutting it the wrong way. But either way, it was getting cut. Things were getting done. And initially that was all right, but unfortunately, and if you have a family member who has an injury like that, then that's the, that's the way I would suggest handling it. You know, offer the help, but don't, don't move in. Don't stay for long term. Yeah, and

for a moment there, I think it's really important to help the other person save face. And it's it in the long run, it's probably better. For you, because you will be easily swamped if you move in too soon with too many things to do. So I'm really glad that you, that you open with that. So go up. Please go on till the rest of it. So

Brenda Marie Sheldrake: the the other thing I would recommend around that we did say to dad, well, Dad, if you don't want our help, what if we hire somebody? And Dad's response was, I don't want a stranger living in my house. And we said, well, what if the stranger is like a college student or something that can pay you rent? You got a great big house there. And my dad was adamant, I don't want a stranger living in my house. I don't want some college kid trying to have parties in the pool room. I don't want no none of that stuff. I'm not going with any of it. So we did much better when we just did the kind of pop by visit that would last a little bit longer, because we're his daughters, and he would never send us away, but he would also never ask us for the help.

That sounds very wise of both of you. So I think though, there came a point when you probably had to do something a little bit more drastic. There

Brenda Marie Sheldrake: was, there was a progression, because unfortunately, my dad didn't have the right diagnosis, and what they thought was sciatic nerve damage was actually a compound fracture in his back, but because it was treated for over a year as sciatic nerve damage, what it meant was that the injury got worse and his ability to get around slowly decreased, and he went from this little old man who wandered around the house grumbling about his back hurting, to this little man who couldn't even get out of a chair without help. And we had to turn to the supports, and we had to look for the supports that were out there. But unfortunately, there aren't as many supports as we would like. The government doesn't have as much stuff as you really like to believe. So when somebody tells you, Oh, I don't understand what your problem is, why don't you hire home care? Why don't you book home care to come in, and why don't you ask this service to come in, and why don't you book Meals on Wheels and do all these things. There's not as many people available to do all those things as you'd like to believe. And so my sister and I were faced with a challenge, and we sat down with my dad one day as his condition was progressing and it was getting progressively worse, and my sister said to my dad, I think we may have to consider looking at maybe you moving someplace, dad, either you're going to come live with me. My sister lived far from town, or else she said, we're going to you're going to have to look at like moving to some kind of a facility. And my poor dad, who never cried, looked at us with tears in his eyes, and my sister was positive that we couldn't do it, that we couldn't do it by ourselves. And so when she left the house that day, and I was on one of my weekend pop by visits, so I was still there, my dad again looked at me with tears in his eyes, and said, You're going to send me away, aren't you? And I said, Dad, I love you. I don't know how to take care of you. I would never send you away, but you have to understand that we don't know how to do what you need done right now. And I think that that's a point that many family members get to where they just don't know how to do what has to be done now, whether it's medication or whether it's the idea of giving your aging father a bath or what it is, but my sister and I made the commitment, and we moved in with my dad, and we spent two years living with my dad while he went through his progression, because what he said to me was, I just want to die in my own bed. I don't want any more treatments, I don't want any more shots, I don't want any more of any of those things. I just want to die in my own bed, which is a very sad and very it's a really, really powerless place for anybody who's listening. We felt really, really powerless. I mean, you don't want to hear this, is it? You don't want to hear, I'm just going to die in my own bed. You want to hear I'm going to get better. You want him to tell you I'm going to get better. We're going to play golf again. Everything's going to be okay. But we were at the point in his journey where. He couldn't promise us that anymore, and eventually, and it it was close to two years my dad did. My dad asked, in his last days, my dad asked for four things. My dad asked it was, it was late winter, and my dad asked for the snow to melt. He asked to see the geraniums one more time. He asked to celebrate one more birthday, and he asked to pass away in his own bed. Of those four things, three of them we couldn't control. We we couldn't we had no way of making sure that he saw his last birthday. We had no way of knowing the two days short of his last birthday he was going to take his last breath, and he passed away in his own bed. Now for all of you who are caregivers out there, this sounds like a really sad story, and you're going, I don't want to do that. I don't want to take this journey. So I want to tell you what the happy part of this is. If I pick up my cell phone right now and I go to my pictures, I have pictures of my dad sitting on the back porch. I have pictures of my dad playing cribbage with me if I go to my videos. I have videos of him talking to the chipmunks who are sitting on his knee while he feeds them peanuts. And I have mental pictures, mental videos of him standing on the back porch with his cane in the air, shaking it like in the air because he was saying, you dumb ass, get in here. You're gonna get struck by lightning. Mowing the lawn. I have the mental pictures of us laughing while we tried to keep our balance while we rake the leaves. And before all this happened, my dad and I had a tepid relationship. It wasn't a really warm relationship, it wasn't a really cold relationship, mostly it was from my side, because I thought I was never good enough, but those two years showed me that I was good enough. Those two years left me with all of those amazing memories, so that when he did pass away, yes, I had to go through the grieving process, because we all will have to go through that grieving process, but what I had afterwards was the warm place in my heart, the beautiful pictures, the beautiful memories. And you know, I don't regret a day of it

that is such a touching, beautiful story. Brenda, and it's all about respecting someone's wishes. And I think sometimes, as caregivers, we feel overwhelmed, and we feel like we just can't do it all, and it's hard to account for the other person ahead of ourselves, but that you were able to do it, and you have all those beautiful souvenirs, which is a French word for remembering, is really both heartbreaking and warm and wonderful all at the same time. Now I did notice in your biography that you focus on anti oppression training, so I was wondering if that dovetails with the caregiving in some way. Is there a connection there that might be helpful for people to know.

Brenda Marie Sheldrake: Well, I think the most important aspect of that is that when it when it comes to anti oppression, it really is about exactly what you said. It's about validating, meeting the person where they're at validating, even if you can't meet their request. If their request is that you for example, if their request is that you leave and go home, but you know that they simply can't function alone anymore, then you have to have that hard conversation. But when it comes to oppression, I think it's really important that we remember our parents are our parents no matter what. So there are ways to have that conversation so it doesn't feel so much as if you're taking over the parenting role and parenting your your parent. It's about giving them choices. It's about the conversation my sister and I had when we said, Do you want us to move in now? Or do you want a stranger to move in now? Because the reality was, either somebody had to move in now or we had to all move out now, you're not safe anymore. Yeah, and and showing them that it comes from a place. Of love. It's I don't I don't want to show up here and find you with a broken hip on the floor having been there for three days. I don't want to shut show up. I know you want to die in your bed, but I don't want to show up and find you laying in bed and having been dead there for three days. Those are horrible things for all of us, and I think that when when you give as much independence, as much as you possibly can, my sister and I one of the things my sister and I were faced with, and we went to my dad's doctor to ask him what to do, because at a certain point, my dad decided he just didn't want to eat anymore. And we tried to entice him with everything possible under the sun. And we went to the doctor. We said he doesn't want to eat. And the doctor said, Girls, he's he's passing away. His system is shutting down, and if he doesn't want to eat, there's no point in forcing him anymore. So what we did, he regardless of how sick he got, he loved chocolate milkshakes. So we'd say, Dad, you want a chocolate milkshake tonight? And he'd say, Yeah, I think a chocolate milkshake would be good. And I would go and I would pick him up a chocolate milkshake, and I'd bring it home, and it didn't matter whether he took two sips and then passed it back to me and said, I'm done for now, or whether he drank the whole thing. And said, that was good. It was still about giving him whatever choices I could, whatever choices we could, and if just one last tip around this, when it comes time that your family can't bathe themselves, can't do those things, that's another one of those really sensitive conversations. My dad didn't want me to give him a bath. He didn't want to shower with me standing there watching him. So we started from a point of, okay, if you're safe enough that I can be right outside the door, and if you start to feel off balance, we got him one of those Shower chairs so he could sit on it. If you need extra help, you let me know we help you into the shower with a towel on. You can pass the shower out the towel out through the shower curtain. And then as we progressed, when that wasn't possible anymore, he was more comfortable at that point with a stranger helping him in and out of the shower than he was with his own daughters. So we have to be sensitive, and this includes culturally sensitive. We have to be sensitive to their values, even if they seem outdated to us, even if you're thinking, I've seen 100 naked butts, even if you work in care, even if you're a caregiver, and you think, I've I've changed so many diapers, it's not the same as putting a diaper on your own father or putting your own father in and out of the shower. So really, that's, that's my key thought around the the anti oppression is that we have to be sensitive to how they feel.

Yeah, it's a strange place to be in, to be taking care of your parents at the end of life, because you become their parent, in a way, but there's still some lines that you really don't want to cross, because they're invasive and they violate the old understanding of being someone's child. So it's a very difficult tight rope to walk to be a family caregiver for someone who raised you, who was your caregiver once, to switch that around, even if your dad didn't participate so much, which I know some of our dads did not, because that was the culture at the time. But even then, making the switch now he's still your dad, or she's still your mom. And some of those transitional things that would be easier, so much easier, if they would just give in, become very oppressive, very, very fast, and that leads to so much more conflict. So as a caregiver, the more you can empathize. As you said, I think you know, the better it's going to go.

Brenda Marie Sheldrake: And I think one other thing around that when it comes to cultural diversity, I had to remember that my dad was raised at a different time than I was raised in, and his comfort level is not the same. It was not the same with multiple different ethnicities as mine was. So the real key to that was not enforcing him to be around people that he wasn't comfortable with. It was around trying to work. But again, there's a limited availability of caregivers. So if your choice is to have someone who's an ethnicity that your family, that your parent isn't comfortable with, or having nobody give them a shower, you need to look. At that. But if it is going to happen, one of the things that I would do my dad was also not very he wasn't he. He was a little bit hard of hearing. Actually, it was a lot harder hearing. And if he didn't have his hearing aids in, he didn't hear you at all. So what I would do, if I I would meet the caregiver at the back door and I would give them a heads up if I thought that there was a possibility that he might say something inappropriate, right? I'm just letting them know that, and I'm not justifying, right? You're not, you're not justifying. You're not saying, oh, whatever dad says is, is cool. You should be okay with it. But you are saying, you know, he might, he might call you honey, or he might say something that that you're not, that doesn't totally land with you, but I would be so grateful to you if you would just bear with me, because I really need this service. We're trying to work with him, but I can't always guarantee what's going to come out of his mouth. That gave the caregivers a heads up,

yeah, and I think many caregivers receive some training about that. There are going to be biases that they have to work around and so on, but it's always good in any situation if you understand what's going to come at you. So it's wonderful to stop and think about that, and I'm sure many people do mourn, and sometimes it's a little more surprising than than you expect. So that is unfortunate, but this has been a great conversation, Brenda, and I've really enjoyed sharing it with you, so I hope that we can renew it again sometime. I imagine now that you are able to not be a caregiver. There's more things that are going to be happening for you in the in the work that you're doing, so I look forward to catching up on that, and at this time, if you have some special links or places you'd like people to connect with you, to continue the conversation, please. Would you list those now for me, and I'll make sure to put them in the show notes as well. So go ahead Absolutely

Brenda Marie Sheldrake: So, so my final thought to all of you is, don't try and navigate this alone. Don't try and do this journey all by yourself, because you think you have to be strong. And if you are looking for someone to reach out to, if you are looking for someone to talk to if you're at one of those challenging points where you're just not sure where to turn I am Brenda Marie Sheldrake on LinkedIn. Reach out to me. Let me know that you heard my talk on Deborah's podcast. Let me know that you'd like to talk that will let me know what you want to talk about, and then we can connect, and I will be happy to share any resources I know of. I have great connections when you're coming up to the point where you have to deal with those grief conversations. It's a great navigation. You. It's a it's a beautiful it can be a beautiful journey, but it can also be a very sad journey, and sometimes you're going to get mad. So if you need some place safe to vent or talk, reach out to me, and I'm happy to be there for you. Thanks so

much. Brenda, that's a very wise ending for us to end on. You can't do it alone. You shouldn't do it alone. And it's great to have people to reach out to to make sure that you can pursue better solutions for yourself. So thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you next time.