By Dennis Thompson

(HealthDay News) -- Jan Ewald took her 91-year-old mother into her home in the spring of 2007 when her mom could no longer live on her own.

Ewald, a registered emergency room nurse, had helped care for her mother for years along with her seven siblings. "I'm the one who ended up taking her into my home and caring for her 24/7," said Ewald, now 65 and living in Chandler, Ariz.

Her mother, Violet Bast, lived with her until she died that August.

Ewald had just moved into a new house when her mother asked if she could move in. "My husband is gone and my kids are all grown up, so it was just her and me," Ewald said. "I have a three-bedroom place, so I gave her two bedrooms." Her mother used one for her bedroom and the other for a TV room.

The few months she spent as a round-the-clock caregiver proved incredibly rewarding, Ewald said.

"I learned more family history those months she was with me than ever before," she recalled. "I found albums, and we would sit and go through the albums. I would turn the picture over and write down what she told me."

Bast told her daughter stories of the Depression and World War II, of raising a Victory Garden and dancing with men on their way off to war. Her family owned a restaurant, hotel and movie theater. "She would provide food for soldiers on leave or coming back from the war," Ewald said. "They would give them free food, free room and board, and then played them free movies."

Ewald said that her mother had grown somewhat reclusive as she aged, so their time together provided Bast with companionship she hadn't had in years.

"She would tell me how grateful she was I was there for her," Ewald recalled. "Being very, very old, she had seen all her friends and most of her family die off. She didn't want to make new friends because she thought God had forgotten she was alive and didn't want to outlive any more friends."

Nonetheless, there were challenges for Ewald. "I had a lot of trouble, even as a nurse, finding all the equipment I needed to make my house safe for her," she said. She scoured the Internet to find safety railings and foam bed wedges and a lift for her mother's motorized chair.

But the hardest challenge, she said, was accepting that she would need to let her mother go when the time came. Mother and daughter had discussed Bast's wishes regarding the end of her life. She did not want to be resuscitated.

"Being an ER nurse, my first instinct would be to bring her back to life," Ewald said. "She said if I did that, she would haunt me."

The end came one night as Ewald helped her mother back to bed after a trip to the bathroom. Ewald had her arms around her mother and was preparing to lower her gently into her bed.

"She just dropped into my arms," Ewald said. "I sat her on the bed and laid her down. I realized she had stopped breathing. I just held her in my arms. It was very traumatic for me, with all my training, to just let her go."

Ewald has since started her own caregiver-support Web site, to help others more easily find the equipment and resources she struggled to locate.

"I don't make a lot of money doing it, but I sure do like helping people who are in the same situation I was in," she said.

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