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It's understandable and completely realistic to have significant fears about old age when you are caring for adult disabled children and your wife has a heart condition.

I feel your life, your significance, your purpose. I become happiness, I become healed. I understand my purpose... you are my gift...

The challenges parents experience in opening bank accounts for their disabled children (the preferred safe option as opposed to finding a safe ATM every month to withdraw grants), highlight a significant gap in the banking system, as my children cannot go into a bank to open their own bank accounts.

Caring for two profoundly disabled children can be emotionally and physically draining. You experience ongoing grief over the loss of the life your children will never have, the life you envisioned for your children is long gone.

Caring for two profoundly disabled adult children at age seventy-two: ChatGPT's take The sadness of being a 72-year-old father of two...

My severely disabled beautiful children, nonverbal with sensory issues and no self-care. It is tough. Some days I feel only like a personal care attendant of two strangers who cannot walk or talk, two people I happen to love so very much that it sometimes hurts. 

I am realising more and more that the past forty plus of my sixty-eight years on earth has passed with me pausing life in more than one way, holding my breath… holding my breath ... I have a new quiet hope inside my spirit.

Mitochondrial diseases are chronic (long-term), genetic, disorders that occur when mitochondria fail to produce enough energy for the body to function properly.  Mitochondrial diseases can be present at birth but can also occur at any age.

In my head I am still a young dad, because Anke and Markus will forever be infants. In my psyche, my life got parked at age 32 on a sunny afternoon near Tarlton by the side of the tar road under a cluster of dusty blue-gum trees.

hold, longing, careful, fulfilled in love, in awe, joy, perfect expectation

Our trench is our children. Our war is not against them – it is for them. Both in their thirties and severely disabled. We must do everything for them. It's a war of a different kind. Physically, mentally, financially – it's one of those wars you don’t even fully understand yourself. How can you expect others to understand it? But it’s a war nonetheless. A bitter, lonely war.

I did lay low this birthday, did not feel like celebrating... and found this Lauren Daigle song called Rescue

I've always wanted to 'take' Anke and Markus 'back' into my body - a tattoo was the only possible taking them back thing I could think of - I am happy with the end result. It was a 'healing' experience.

Stefan unearthed buried dreams. The mention of his age. The energy he radiated and shared as a young man reminded me of what can never be and will never be: Retired, with a grandson who wants to be a firefighter!

Caregivers of disabled children are especially vulnerable to this condition. While the natural human instinct to help your child remains, the emotional resources needed to sustain compassion can wear down over time.

I wrote before about how God does not just bring us through suffering, but he also works in our suffering. But, what if the healing comes? Or, what if it never comes in this life? Is our hope in the comfort, the relief, the healing here? No, far more than healing, our hope is in God himself and him alone.