For Santa Rosa caregiver, final weeks of the dying most revealing

It is during the last months, weeks and days of life that we realize the final return on our most important life investments. And if we invested wisely, says caregiver Viniana Gaunavinaka, the end of life can be surprisingly peaceful, and even welcome.

“Life in the end is what you invest in the beginning,” she says. “Whatever you sowed, whatever you invested in, is what you reap in the end. And I believe very strongly that if anything is important in life, it’s investing in relationships. It’s all that matters at the end. And if you were a person who invested in people, it also shows.”

She speaks with the clarity of a caregiver who has quietly observed multiple people, with different personalities and family dynamics, as they reach the furthest edge of life. She has seen people warmed by a blanket of family and friends and others whose last act was painfully solo.

“It’s wonderful to have money. It’s all good. But if that doesn’t build relationships,” she says, “it’s very lonely at the end.”

Gaunavinaka has learned to tell much about a person by who is there at the last. She recalls a very rich elderly man for whom one of her Fijian relatives was a caregiver. He lived in a spectacular home. His children rarely visited. One was estranged. His caregivers would serve as surrogate family, spending Thanksgiving and Christmas with him.

“We became the family,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how good your home is. Those things, only if they are shared, are they meaningful.”

Gaunavinaka, 47, came to caregiving three years ago, after some 25 years working in community development and social service around the Pacific Rim.

Having studied counseling at the religious University of the Nations in Hawaii, she brings a singular insight to her newest calling. It is an insight rooted in both education and experience, as well as her early years growing up in a Fijian village.

Multiple generations and extended family all live under one roof. There is always someone home or available to care for those who need it. She recalls a happy childhood with no TV, where one of the great pleasures was listening to grandparents and other elders pass down their stories. In all of Fiji, there are only a few facilities for the elderly, mainly for people from other countries.

“It is ingrained in us that one of the highest honors you can have,” Gaunavinaka says, “is to take care of those who took care of you.”

Because she has lived in the U.S. for so many years, the last three in Santa Rosa, Gaunavinaka understands the pressures that compel many American families to seek outside help. Families are smaller and far-flung, and so many people are tethered to jobs.

But she laments that there is also something in our culture that consigns the elderly to invisibility when they are no longer productive.

“America puts a value on performance. It’s a performance-driven society,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It is why you are successful as a society and why everyone wants to come here. Whereas in my culture, whether you are rich or poor, just the fact that you are older and because you’ve lived life and contributed in some way, is reason enough to get respect.”

As a caregiver, Gaunavinaka finds herself filling that void when family is frequently absent. There was one elderly woman with whom she was so close she would take her to church and other social functions, and have her in her own home for several days during the holidays. When the woman died, Gaunavinaka spoke at her funeral.

“Caregiving is not a kind of work you can clearly define where the professional lines are drawn. You can’t look at it as an eight-to-four job. You are almost everything to them,” she says.

As a caregiver, she can find herself at the center of a family storm, “a living organism that is one of the most complicated.” Some family members will insist on having their own way rather than compromising. Some will abandon an elder if they feel there is no inheritance to glean.

But what unites people at the end of a life, she says, is a shared love for another human being. It can be experienced within families, yet it is also present in that bond that is forged between caregiver and another human being. It is saying, “I love you not for what you have done, or what you haven’t done. I love you simply for who you are.”

Gaunavinaka has seen two women to the end of their lives in the past year. She’s not sure how many more she can go through. “You get connected,” she says. “There can be a beauty in dying, but it’s still difficult.”