When Dave Kendall promised to love Diana, he meant it

Writing in the Washington Post Magazine, Liza Mundy profiles a marriage that has been irrevocably changed by Huntington’s disease, a hereditary degenerative disorder. Since his wife Diana was diagnosed in 2000 at age 48, Dave Kendall has become her primary caregiver. An excerpt:

He is taking the ultimate test of marital commitment in the modern medical era.

In the past several decades, something known as “family caregiving” has entered the American lexicon. As the baby boom generation has moved into late middle age, some 44 million adults find themselves caring for an ill family member, usually an elderly parent. Caregivers are now a constituency. They have Web sites, support groups, alliances, lobbying organizations.

With good reason: Family caregivers provide billions of dollars in uncompensated health care for some of the country’s most chronically ill citizens. Within this group is a subset, an estimated 14 million who are caregivers for their spouses. Most are aging wives and husbands taking care of older or sicker mates. But some, such as Dave Kendall, are caring for spouses at a far younger age than would be reasonably expected.

Theirs, of course, is not an entirely new predicament. There have always been wives and husbands who went to bed, as the saying went, and never got up. What’s different, now, is that people with serious injuries and degenerative conditions tend to live longer than in past eras. For their spouses, this can be a blessing — the person you love is still alive and with you — and a prolonged challenge.

“It used to be that people got ill and died,” says Richard Anderson, president of a small but growing group called the Well Spouse Association … Now, people get ill and — survive. And their spouses face a series of dilemmas that boil down to: Was this really what I signed on for?

Followup: Q & A with Dave Kendall and Liza Mundy

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 7:48 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, caregivers, chronic illness, families, genetics, personal stories, quality of life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post