Aiding her dying husband, a geriatrician learns the emotional and physical toll of caregiving
The loss of a husband. The death of a sister. Taking in an elderly mother with dementia.
This has been a year like none other for Dr. Rebecca Elon, who has dedicated her professional life to helping older adults.
It’s taught her what families go through when caring for someone with serious illness as nothing has before.
“Reading about caregiving of this kind was one thing,” she said. “Experiencing it was entirely different.”
Were it not for the challenges she’s faced during the coronavirus pandemic, Elon might not have learned firsthand how exhausting end-of-life care can be, physically and emotionally — something she understood only abstractly previously as a geriatrician.
And she might not have been struck by what she called the deepest lesson of this pandemic: that caregiving is a manifestation of love, and that love means being present with someone even when suffering seems overwhelming.
All these experiences have been “a gift, in a way: They’ve truly changed me,” said Elon, 66, a part-time associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an adjunct associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Uniquely rich perspective
Elon’s uniquely rich perspective on the pandemic is informed by her multiple roles: family caregiver, geriatrician and policy expert specializing in longterm care.
“I don’t think we, as a nation, are going to make needed improvements (in long-term care) until we take responsibility for our aging mothers and fathers — and do so with love and respect,” she said.
Elon has been acutely aware of prejudice against older adults — and determined to overcome it — since she first expressed interest in geriatrics in the late 1970s.
“Why in the world would you want to do that?” she recalled being asked by a department chair at Baylor College of Medicine, where she was a medical student. “What can you possibly do for those (old) people?”
Elon ignored the scorn and became the first geriatrics fellow at Baylor, in Houston, in 1984. She cherished the elderly aunts and uncles she had visited every year during her childhood and was eager to focus on this new specialty, which was just being established in the U.S.
“She’s an extraordinary advocate for elders and families,” said Dr. Kris Kuhn, a retired geriatrician and longtime friend.
In 2007, Elon was named geriatrician of the year by the American Geriatrics Society.
Unexpected turn
Her life took an unexpected turn in 2013 when she started noticing personality changes and judgment lapses in her husband, Dr. William Henry Adler III, former chief of clinical immunology research at the National Institute on Aging, part of the federal National Institutes of Health. Proud and stubborn, he re