Later Life & Caregiving Archives - Page 6 of 13

The Second Childhood Is Not Soft

Reading Time: 2 minutes

No one tells you about the anger.

The books about caring for aging parents talk about the grief and the tenderness and the gift of this time and the importance of patience and I have felt all of those things, genuinely, I am not disputing the grief or the tenderness or the occasional gift. But they do not talk about the days when the patience runs out and you are standing in the kitchen at nine in the evening after you drove an hour each way to help with something that should have been a phone call, and the anger is there, specific and guilt-soaked and real.

The anger at the situation. That is the one I can acknowledge.

The anger at a system that places this work, this enormous, endless, technically demanding, emotionally complex, physically exhausting work, on the shoulders of adult children and calls it love instead of labour. That calls it family instead of a social failure. That does not pay for it, does not train you for it, does not acknowledge that you are doing it while also doing everything else you were already doing, the job, the household, the remnants of your own life that still require your attention even though your attention is increasingly not available.

And then there is the other anger. The one I am less comfortable with.

The anger of loving someone who is diminishing. The particular fury of watching a sharp mind go soft at the edges, watching a woman who could once manage everything need help with things she would have been humiliated to need help with a decade ago, and knowing that she knows, on some days, what is happening, and that the knowing is its own unbearable thing for her. I am angry at the disease or the age or whatever we are calling this. I am angry that it is happening to her. I am angry that she cannot be spared it.

And underneath the anger is the love, always the love, the love is the reason the anger exists at all, the love is what makes the loss so present, what makes the diminishment so hard to watch.

No one tells you it is all the same thing. That the anger and the grief and the love and the exhaustion are not separate experiences happening in rotation. They are simultaneous. They are the same breath.

You breathe it all in at once and you keep showing up.

The Photo Album I Finally Opened

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It was on a shelf for eleven years.

I knew what was in it. I had put it there knowing what was in it, which was the years I was not entirely sure I wanted to look at yet, the years I was still processing, still metabolizing, still not at the distance I needed to look at them clearly rather than from inside the feeling, which is a different kind of looking and not always the right kind. I left it on the shelf. I walked past it. I dusted around it, which is its own kind of strange, cleaning the shelf that holds the years you are not ready to open.

I opened it last month.

I did not plan to. I was looking for something else entirely and the album was between the something else and where I was standing and I took it down and sat on the floor with my back against the bookshelf the way you sit when you are doing something that requires you to be on the floor, close to the ground, grounded, because the ground is steadying for things that might not be steady.

The children were so small.

That was the first thing, the simplest and most unbearable thing, the faces of the small versions of people who are now fully themselves, the evidence of their smallness in a form I had let myself almost forget because living with children means you live in the current version and stop being able to see the accumulation of all the previous versions simultaneously. The album gave me all the versions at once. I was not prepared for all the versions at once.

And there I was in the photographs.

Younger, tired, in the middle of things, not performing anything in most of them because who performs for a photograph in a kitchen in 2009. Just there, just a woman in the middle of the life, and I looked at her with the tenderness I have been practising for the present-me and extended it backward, all the way back, to the woman in the album who did not know what was coming and was doing the thing anyway, who was, in her own approximate and imperfect way, enough.

She was enough. I put the album back on the shelf.

I know where it is now. I will take it down again.

The Night I Couldn’t Sleep and Didn’t Fight It

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Three in the morning used to be the enemy.

I used to lie in the three o’clock dark and fight it. Fight the wakefulness, fight the mind that was already running through everything it had to run through, fight the body’s failure to do the thing the body was supposed to do, which was sleep, which is not optional, which the research is extremely clear about, and yet here we were at three in the morning again, awake, alert, the nervous system apparently unaware that this was not when the day was supposed to begin.

Last week I stopped fighting it.

I got up. I made tea. I took the tea to the chair by the window, not the desk, not anywhere with a screen, the chair, and I sat in the dark with the tea and the particular quality of three in the morning, which is different from any other time, which has a texture and a sound that no other hour has. The neighbourhood at three. The particular silence of a world that is not performing itself. The one car in the distance that exists for no reason that concerns me. The way the dark outside is not quite dark but a specific shade of not-quite that my eyes had time to learn.

I was there for an hour and a half.

Not productively. Not journaling or planning or using the time in the way I used to try to use it, turning the insomnia into a second shift of quiet work because at least then the wakefulness was not wasted. Just there. Just the tea and the chair and the three o’clock dark and my own breathing and the slow discovery that three in the morning, when you stop fighting it, is actually quite inhabitable.

The body is not failing when it wakes at three.

I am trying to understand that. The body is doing something, moving through something, processing the residue of a day or a week or a year in the way that bodies process things when they are not occupied with the tasks of being upright. This is not malfunction. This is the body being in its own way. And sitting with the tea at three in the morning without fighting is, I think, the closest thing I have found to trusting the body to know what it needs. Even when what it needs is to be awake in the dark, quietly, with the tea, for a little while.

The Permission I Finally Gave Myself

Reading Time: 2 minutes

To not be fine.

That was the first one and the hardest one. The permission to say, without the immediate qualifier, without the but-I-am-managing or the it-will-pass or the I-know-others-have-it-worse, that I was not fine, that the not-fine was real and was the size I was saying it was and did not need to be justified against a scale of greater suffering before it was allowed to be acknowledged. I gave myself that permission and it felt, the first time, like a small illegal act, like taking something I had not been offered, and it was not illegal and it was not taking, it was just the truth, and the truth does not require permission, but the speaking of it without apology did, and I gave myself that.

To take the long way.

Not as inefficiency. As the understanding that the long way is sometimes where the actual things are, that the direct route is the route of a person in a hurry and I have been in a hurry for most of my adult life and the hurry missed things, missed the particular quality of a morning that only happens when you are going slowly enough to be in it, missed the bird and the light and the conversation that starts because you have time for it to start, because you took the long way and the long way had room in it.

To write the things that might not be good.

This one was specific to the writing and is the permission that makes all the other writing possible. The permission to write the thing that might not be good without that possibility being a reason not to write it, to get to the good thing by writing through the not-good things without stopping at the not-good and calling it done. Most of the bad writing I have written has led somewhere. Most of the good writing was reached by going through something worse. The permission to write badly on the way to writing better is the permission that let the poems happen.

To be glad.

This sounds like the smallest permission and it is the largest one. The permission to feel good in a life that still contains hard things, to be glad in a season that is also the season of watching my mother diminish, to let the joy be real even when the grief is also real, to not require the resolution of the sad before I allow the glad. Both of them are true. Both of them are allowed. I gave myself that and the giving was the whole of the turning, the whole of the arriving at this morning, which is good, in which I am, improbably and actually and with my whole self, glad.

The Night She Asked Me Not to Go

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She does not always ask.

She has too much pride to ask in the direct way, too much of the self-sufficiency she built over a lifetime of not having the luxury of needing people to stay, of having had to let people go because that is what was required and what was required was what she did, without complaint, without the kind of lingering that might have been read as neediness, which she would not have allowed herself to be read as, not then, not when the needing was something to be managed quietly rather than named.

But that night she looked at me when I picked up my coat and she said: do you have to go yet.

Not do you have to go. Yet. The yet is the whole of it. The yet is the question inside the question, the one that says: I am not asking you to stay forever, I am not asking you to rearrange your life, I am just asking whether the going has to happen right now, in this exact moment, before the evening has finished being the evening. Do you have to go yet.

I put my coat back down.

I said: not yet. And I meant it without reservation, without the calculation of what the staying would cost me in the practical sense, without the accounting of the drive home and the hour and the things that still needed doing. I put the coat down and I meant it and we watched another hour of the program and she fell asleep in the chair and I sat with her while she slept because the sitting felt like the right thing, because being there while she slept felt like an extension of the being there while she was awake, like the care does not stop when the person stops being conscious of the care.

I drove home at ten thirty.

The things that had needed doing were still there and they waited and nothing was harmed by the waiting. The hour I gave her was not taken from anywhere that could not afford to give it. The coat on the chair for one more hour cost me nothing I needed and gave her something she needed and I would do it again every time, every single time she looks at me when I pick up my coat and says: do you have to go yet.

Not yet. Not yet. The answer is always not yet for as long as I have not yet to give.

The Pension Letter

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It arrived on a Tuesday in a white envelope with a government logo in the upper left corner.

Inside: four pages. Calculations. Years of service converted to a monthly figure. A chart showing the formula. A phone number to call if I had questions. A reminder that the first payment would arrive on the fifteenth.

Twenty-five years.

That is what twenty-five years looks like in the language of administration. Four pages. A formula. A number with a decimal point. A phone number for questions.

I held the letter for a long time. I was trying to find myself in it. The first year, when I was thirty-two and terrified and certain that I was going to be found out, that someone was going to realize they had let the wrong person into the room. The year of the student who changed everything, who came to my office and wept and said you are the only person who has ever made me feel like I could do this, and I held that with me for months, that particular weight, the weight of mattering to someone in a precise and lasting way. The year the contract did not come and I sat in the parking lot of a grocery store and did the math on my phone, whether I could make it to September on what was in the account, whether I should tell anyone, whether telling anyone would make it more real than it already was.

None of that is in the letter.

The letter does not contain any of it. The letter is a document. It is trying to be useful. It does not know that what I needed was not a calculation but a witness. Someone to read the whole twenty-five years and say: we see what you did here. We see what it cost. We see the gap between what you gave and what you were given. We see you.

I folded the letter back into the envelope.

I put the kettle on.

The fifteenth is three weeks away.

The New Resident

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She has been there three months and she knows the staff by name.

That is the first thing I noticed, on the second visit, that she had learned them, had applied the same attention she has always applied to the people around her, the attention that collects names and notices things and finds the particular person behind the role, that has always made her the person in any room who knows the story underneath the story. The woman who brings the evening meal has a daughter in Edmonton. The man who does the overnight check has a cold he cannot shake. She knows. She asks. That is who she is and the who-she-is did not go into storage when she moved into the room.

I worried that it would.

I worried that the move would diminish her in some fundamental way, that the smaller room and the managed schedule and the loss of the particular sovereignty of a woman in her own kitchen making her own tea at the hour she chose would take something from the essential her that could not be replaced. I prepared myself for a reduced version and I got the same version in a different room, the same woman with her sharp eye and her opinions about the program they play too loudly in the common area and her preference for the chair by the window because the light is better and she is still, even here, even now, choosing the better light.

She has made it hers.

Her lamp on the bedside table. The photograph on the shelf. The blue cardigan on the hook by the door. The small territory of objects that say: a specific person lives here, not a resident, not a patient, a person, this person, with her history and her preferences and her lamp that has been her lamp for forty years and gives the light she knows and came with her because her daughter packed it, which her daughter did because her daughter knows her, and being known is the thing that does not fit in any room but lives in the person who carries it and goes wherever she goes.

She is okay.

I drive home from the visits and I sit in the car for a minute and take the temperature of myself and the temperature is: she is okay. Not unchanged. Not without loss. But okay in the way that matters, which is still herself, still choosing the better light, still learning the names, still the person I have always known, in a smaller room, with the lamp on.

The Morning After the Last Day

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I expected to feel different.

I had been telling myself for months that on the morning after the last day I would wake up and feel the shift, feel the weight lift, feel something definitively other than what I had been feeling for twenty-five years of waking up and already belonging to the institution before my feet touched the floor. I had been promising myself a morning that felt new.

I woke up at five forty-three.

Because the body does not get the memo on the first morning. The body is still on contract. The body woke at five forty-three because five forty-three was when the body learned to wake, when the calculation began, the quiet arithmetic of what needed to happen before leaving the house, the mental checklist running before consciousness had fully arrived. Prep. Email. The student who was struggling. The form that was due. The thing I had told myself I would remember and had not written down.

And then I remembered. There was no form. There was no student. There was no checklist. There was a morning, just a morning, the same sky it had always been, the same birds starting up outside the window, and it was mine in a way it had not been mine for longer than I could precisely account for.

I lay there for an hour.

Not sleeping. Not planning. Just lying there in the fact of it, letting it arrive at its own pace, the way you let your eyes adjust to a new light rather than forcing them. Not rushing toward the freedom because the freedom was there and it was not going anywhere and there was, finally, no urgency, no next thing pressing against the back of this thing, no deadline built into the texture of the morning itself.

At six forty-five I made coffee.

I drank it while it was still hot. That was new. That was, I think, the first thing that was actually new.

The Meal We Made Together for the Last Time Without Knowing

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The last time is always invisible when it is happening.

That is the hard fact of the lasts, which is that they are indistinguishable from the ordinaries when you are inside them, that the last time you do a thing with a person looks exactly like every other time until later, until the later when you understand that there was a last time and this was it and you were not watching it closely enough because you did not know to watch it closely and there is no way to know to watch it closely and still you wish you had.

The last time she and I made the Christmas meal together.

I did not know it was the last time. It looked like every other Christmas meal, like the particular coordinated chaos of two women in a kitchen who have different ideas about the right order of operations and have been negotiating those ideas for decades, who know by now which battles are worth having and which are just preference and have sorted most of them into preference and proceed accordingly. She was slower than the year before. I had noticed and not named it. We made the meal and we ate the meal and it was good and it was Christmas and that was enough and I did not hold it with the specific attention of a last time because it did not look like a last time.

It was the last time.

The next year the kitchen was too much, the standing was too long, the coordination required more than was available on that day and I made the meal and she sat at the table and directed from the table, which she was good at, which is her in another form, the same knowledge in a different posture.

I am trying to make peace with the not-knowing.

With the understanding that the last times are only visible from after, which means the best you can do is be present to all the times, to treat each one as if it could be the one you will need to go back to, not with dread but with the particular quality of attention that is also love, that says: this matters, this specific meal, this specific woman in this specific kitchen, this Christmas that is only this Christmas and will not come again.

I was present to that one. Not fully. More than some. Enough that I have something to go back to.

I am going to be more present to the ones that are left. Whatever is left. However many. I am going to be there for all of them as though each one could be the last, because each one could be, and presence is the only thing I have left to give that the lasts cannot take from me.

The Marriage After the Children Leave

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We had been good at parenting together.

That was the thing we had in common when everything else got complicated, the thing we could always come back to, the shared project of raising these specific people well, the daily coordination of it, the logistics and the conversations and the driving and the showing up for the things that needed showing up for. We were a good team. We had teamwork even in the years when we were not particularly good at being a couple, when the couple had been put aside in favor of the parents, which happens without your permission and without your noticing until one day someone asks how you and your husband are doing and you realize you have not thought about that question in months.

And then the project ended and it was just us again.

Not just us the way we were before the children, because you cannot go back to before, the before is a country that no longer exists, the before is a version of two people who had not yet been through everything that changes you, who had not yet failed each other in the small accumulated ways that couples fail each other and either forgive or don’t. We are not the before-people. We are the after-people, standing in a quiet house trying to remember who we are to each other when we are not primarily the parents.

Some evenings it is easy.

Some evenings we are just two people having dinner who genuinely like each other, who have been through enough together that the liking has a depth to it, a texture, a history. Who can sit in silence without the silence being a problem. Who still make each other laugh in the particular way that only the person who knows all your material can make you laugh, who knows the references and the shorthand and the exact moment to use the look that means: we see this the same way.

Other evenings we are strangers in the house who need to find their way back to each other.

And I have learned, slowly, that both of those evenings are the marriage. Not the easy ones only. Not the good years only. The whole of it, the strangers and the known and the long silence and the laugh and the learning each other again, which is the work of a long marriage, the endless re-meeting of a person who keeps becoming someone new and so do you and the two of you keep having to find each other in the new versions.

We are still finding each other.

I think that is the answer. I think that is enough.