Almost a decade of writing about aged care in Australia has taught me that no two families arrive at the decision to seek residential care the same way, but almost all of them carry the same thing afterwards: guilt.
I used to think I understood that guilt from a professional distance. I didn’t. As bad as it sounds, I have to confess something: I used to be smug and judgmental about families who put their loved ones into residential aged care. I genuinely couldn’t fathom how someone could shirk the responsibility of caring for somebody who once cared for them.
It felt like abandonment, but in reality, I was blind to a harsh reality that no amount of love, sacrifice or good intentions can overcome.
My mum was diagnosed with dementia in 2021. For three years, my brother, my aunty, my uncle, my cousin and I did everything we could to keep her at home. I was sleeping over twice a week, working from home the other days, driving 90 minutes each way while my wife was pregnant with our first child.
And through all of it, every single drive, I felt nothing but guilt. Guilt for being away from mum. Guilt for leaving my wife. Guilt that never actually went away. It simply kept finding new things to attach itself to.
What I didn’t understand back then, when I still held that quiet judgement, is that guilt doesn’t disappear once you make the hard decision. It just changes shape.
For three years, we made it work between us. My brother and uncle lived with mum full-time, and my aunty visited almost every single day along with my cousin. I added two overnight stays a week on top of working from home, which meant a 90-minute drive there and a 90-minute drive back, twice weekly, on top of everything else.
During mum’s final year at home, my wife was pregnant with our first child. So every week, I was effectively leaving her for four days and two nights to go and care for my mother.
My wife never once made me feel bad about it. She was, and is, remarkably understanding. But she didn’t need to say anything for the guilt to set in. I did that all on my own.
Nobody warns you about the guilt. Not the guilt of a single bad moment, but a low, constant hum that starts the second you get in the car and doesn’t let up until you’re home again, and then begins all over again the next time you leave.
Every time I left mum’s place to drive home to my pregnant wife, I was consumed by it. I felt like I was abandoning mum. Then I’d walk through my own front door and feel like I’d abandoned my wife for four days to do it. There was no direction I could drive in that felt like the right one.
It was exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, though I wasn’t getting much of that either.
By the time our daughter was born, the combination of guilt, sleep deprivation and the demands of my working life had already ground me down. I was already trying to silence the quiet voice in my head telling me that moving mum into aged care might actually be the safer option. I just didn’t have the courage to listen to it yet.
The pebble that started the landslide came a few weeks later.
Mum wandered out of bed one night, silently, avoiding the monitors we’d set up in her room. She mistook a bottle of bleach under the laundry sink for water, and took a sip. She had never once gone near that laundry sink before. None of us even knew the bleach was there. She’d also started trying to wander out the front door at night.
That was the moment safety stopped being a hypothetical. Placing mum in aged care was the hardest decision I have ever made.
The first day, she seemed okay. Settled, even. But when I came back on day two, she had a look on her face, shock, disappointment, that I still see when I close my eyes.
By then, she could no longer tell me in words what she was feeling, but she didn’t need to. When I hugged her, she let out this massive sigh, the kind that only comes from somewhere truly stressed and holding it in. It was heartbreaking. It made me question what kind of person I actually was.
We chose a facility close to the rest of my family rather than close to me, because it meant more people could visit her regularly. It was the right decision for mum. It also meant my own commute became 90 minutes each way, which meant a lot of time alone in a car again, with a lot of guilt to sit in.
On top of it all, we were also adjusting to life with a newborn, which meant the guilt now had a new shape entirely: leaving an exhausted new mother alone with our baby to spend another 90 minutes alone with that guilt, over and over again.
Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t just caring for a parent with dementia. I was also, at the exact same time, becoming a parent myself. Caring “up” for mum and “down” for my own newborn, often on the same day, sometimes within the same hour.
It turns out there’s a name for this, and I’m far from the only one living it. More than 1.5 million Australians are currently part of what’s known as the “sandwich generation”: people caring for both ageing parents and children at the same time. On average, these carers spend around 15 hours a week on unpaid care for an ageing parent and another 15 hours on their kids, leaving less than 10 hours a week for themselves. Caregiving in this position looks different again when dementia is involved, since the needs are less predictable and the emotional toll runs deeper than the physical caregiving tasks alone.
Nine in ten sandwich generation carers report experiencing burnout, and it’s not hard to understand why. You’re needed in two directions at once, and there’s no version of the day where both people get everything they need from you.
If any of this sounds familiar, know that the exhaustion and the guilt you’re feeling isn’t a personal failing. It’s an incredibly common, well-documented experience shared by well over a million other Australian families right now.
Mum is now in the advanced stages of dementia. She’s non-verbal, non-mobile after a fall in care left her with a broken hip, which brought its own fresh wave of guilt, and she needs to be hoisted for every transfer, every shower and every part of daily care.
Strangely, the one thing that’s eased is the specific distress she showed in those first weeks. Her cognitive decline means she can no longer fully understand her surroundings, which means she’s no longer visibly suffering the way she was during that first fortnight.
It’s a strange kind of relief. The guilt of the placement itself has softened, but it’s been replaced by a quieter, more persistent guilt that never fully resolves. Am I visiting enough? Should it be more? Is once a week enough? Is twice enough? Will it ever feel like enough?
I don’t think that particular question has an answer. I think it’s just part of what this is now.
Looking back, I realise I was judging people whose stories I didn’t know. I mistook placement for abandonment, when in many cases it’s the final act of caring someone can give. Love doesn’t always look like keeping someone at home. Sometimes love is recognising when home is no longer the safest place for them.
The best available Australian evidence suggests that around 43% of Australians aged 65 and over who died had used permanent residential aged care at some point in the years before their death, according to data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
Other studies estimate the lifetime probability of entering permanent aged care is even higher for women, up to around 46% from age 65 onward. That’s not a small, unlucky minority. That’s nearly half of all families in this country, at some point, facing some version of the drive I described above.
If you’re reading this and you’re carrying that same guilt, I don’t have any advice for you. I just wanted you to know you’re not the only person carrying it.
If any part of this article has struck a nerve, please know that support is available, and reaching out for it isn’t a sign of weakness.
If you’re a carer yourself, Carers Australia and Carer Gateway can also connect you with respite care, counselling and financial support in your state. Details at carergateway.gov.au.
