The Healing Journey

September 17, 2026

                                                                                                    (Photo by James Maldonado Berry)

The following is excerpted from “A Home for Grandma: Caregiving and the Cross” by James Maldonado Berry, which appeared in the National Catholic Register.

With the family’s agreement, Grandma would move into my new home. My parents (who had moved into my house as well) signed off on the idea. It was settled. It’d be a multigenerational home.

The resolution of a major question brought with it a profound sense of relief. However, those precious plans I’d been carefully organizing for years about how everything would be “just so” in my home had been tossed out the window.

It’s been just over a year since Grandma took up residence here, a year of round-the-clock caregiving, laughter, routine adjustments both large and small, energy-sapping trials, dementia-induced mood swings, family bonding, and occasional tears. Evening routines consist in helping Grandma with dinner and her word-search puzzles, as well as singing along to old Spanish songs to help her get into a better mood.

Amazingly, she remembers many lyrics of songs dating back 60 years. Dementia is, among many things, a mysterious illness.

Of course, she’ll ask the same questions over and over. The most common are when she’s going home, where she’ll be sleeping tonight and, touchingly, where her mother is and why she hasn’t come to see her yet.

Through trial and error, I’ve gotten better at addressing and, at times, deflecting these questions. Each night carries with it an exhausting uncertainty. Will she sleep soundly, or will she get up multiple times? When she does get up, will she be clear-headed and relatively independent, or completely out of it and require help with each step to the bathroom? Sometimes throughout the day, she gets upset and impatient, and she lets us know with choice words. “It’s not her; it’s the illness.” We hear that a lot, and it is certainly true. The unpredictable mood swings and verbal arrows nevertheless take a toll.

Along with many caregivers, I’ve come to appreciate the necessity of patience. But as a Catholic, I’ve come to depend on supernatural grace and perspective when exhaustion sets in or impatience surfaces.

The other night, Grandma was more restless in bed than usual. Pulling up a chair next to her bed, I sat with her for a couple of hours. I brought a rosary, a few relics and a book (Crime and Punishment) to pass the time. An old lamp gave off a soft glow from the corner. I prayed, read about a young man’s sin and guilt, rested my hand on the relics, and occasionally held Grandma’s hand as she’d reach out. She eventually fell asleep.

Experiencing the toll dementia takes on Grandma, as well as on each of us who cares for her, I’ve come to better understand why God did what He did with my carefully crafted “plans.” He was asking me to give more, to love more — and ultimately to trust Him more. Plans certainly are important but, coupled with the effects of our fallen nature, they often are burdened with a desire to control.

The tendency in the many moments of frustration and weakness was to think of the house as mine, the time as mine, the plans as mine. I was supposed to be able to control and arrange everything, just as I had planned. I’d earned it, after all. The self-regard was clear. And God, the Physician of souls, needed to heal it.

(James Maldonado Berry is dean of formation and teaches catechism at Aquinas Academy, a classical Catholic school in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.)

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