Later Life & Caregiving Archives - Page 7 of 13

The Night Before She Went Into Care

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We did not call it what it was.

We called it the transition. We called it the new arrangement. We called it, in the most optimistic framing available to us, the next chapter, as though it were a narrative event with a story logic rather than a door closing on a version of things that had been ours, that had been ordinary, that we had not known we were cherishing until we were on the other side of it.

The night before I stayed.

Not because she asked me to. Because I could not imagine being anywhere else. I slept on the couch in her living room and I woke twice and both times the house was quiet and I lay in the dark and listened to it, the particular quiet of a house that has been lived in for eleven years, that holds the shape of a woman who has moved through it daily for eleven years, the house as archive of her specific habits and preferences, the arrangement of things that was entirely hers and would be, after tomorrow, someone else’s to manage.

She slept through the night.

In the morning she was clear. One of the clear mornings, which I have learned to receive without clutching and failed to receive without clutching because this was not an ordinary clear morning, this was the last morning in this house, and the clarity felt like a gift that was also a complication, because a clear morning meant she understood what was happening, which meant her dignity was intact, which meant she knew.

She had tea. She looked around her living room.

She said: I had a good life here. Not as question. As the plain statement of a woman who is making her accounting and has found, in this particular room on this particular morning, that the accounting comes out right. I had a good life here. And then she put down her cup and said: well. Let’s go then.

I helped her with her coat.

There. The word I always use. There. We went out the door together. I did not look back at the house. That was the one thing I gave myself. I did not look back.

The Hour After She Falls Asleep

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I do not always leave right away.

Sometimes I stay in the chair beside her and watch her sleep in the way you watch someone sleep when you love them and when the watching has a quality to it that is different from ordinary watching, that is weighted with things you cannot say when they are awake and so you say them into the sleeping, into the air of the room, into the quiet that holds them without requiring them to respond.

She sleeps differently than she used to.

Lighter. More easily disturbed. Her face in sleep is not the arranged face she wears when she knows she is being seen, which is still, even now, the face of a woman who has opinions about how she presents herself to the world. The sleeping face is the other face, the one without the management, and it is older and softer and more undefended, and I look at it and I look at it and I try to hold it in the way you try to hold something you understand you will not always have access to.

I talk to her when she is sleeping.

Not loudly. In the voice you use when you are saying something to a room rather than a person. I say the things I have not found the right moment for, the specific gratitudes and the unresolved loves and the things I learned from her that I did not know I was learning until I was learning them in the wrong direction, in the direction of her needing the things from me that she once gave me, and I understood in the reversing what the giving must have been. I say those things to the sleeping room, to the lamp that is also my lamp now, to the space that holds her and will not always hold her.

I do not know if she hears any of it.

There is some research that suggests the sleeping mind receives more than we think. I do not know if I believe it. I say the things anyway. Not for the research. For myself, for the record, for the version of me that will someday need to know that I said them, that I sat in the chair and I looked at her sleeping face and I said out loud what she meant, what she means, what she will always mean.

Then I get up quietly. I turn off the lamp that is her lamp. I leave the room.

The saying was enough. It always is.

The Last Poem in This Collection

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I did not know I was writing a collection when I started.

I started because I needed to write, because writing is how I process and how I grieve and how I understand things that resist understanding through any other method, because the poem does something the essay cannot, which is get to the center of a thing by circling it rather than walking straight at it, which allows the truth to arrive sideways, through the particular image or the unexpected turn of a sentence that says the thing the mind was not ready to say directly.

I wrote about the work and the body and the sea.

And then I kept writing. About the children leaving and the mother needing and the retirement and the mirror and the grief that has no name and the grief that has too many names and the garden and the soup and the lamp and the coat and the songs that stay when everything else goes. About the ordinary Tuesday that was the whole of it. About the coming-through. About what is possible on the other side of the hardest years, which turns out to be more than I knew, which turns out to be the particular morning I am in right now, which I did not know was waiting for me when I was in the middle years doing the middle-year work, which I know now and intend to be present in for as long as it is available to me.

This is what the writing gave me.

Not resolution. Not the tidy ending where the arc of the difficulty completes and the lesson is clear and the woman who has been through the thing emerges wise and finished. The writing gave me the record. The evidence of a life that was in the world, that paid attention, that felt things and named them and got up the next morning and paid attention again. The evidence that I was here, that the Tuesday happened, that the soup was made and the coat was held and the songs were sung and the lamp stayed on.

I was here.

That is the whole of what I want any of these poems to say, underneath everything else they say. Whatever else is in them, the labour and the love and the grief and the tentative returning to joy, underneath it all: I was here. I was in my life. I paid attention to it. I wrote it down so that the paying attention would be in the record, would outlast the forgetting, would be findable by whoever comes next and needs to know that a woman was here and noticed things and found, in the noticing, that it was enough.

It was always enough.

I am still here. Still writing. Still paying attention. Still, on most mornings, glad.

The Last Day Nobody Noticed

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I thought there would be a moment.

Not a party, I was not asking for a party, I know how institutions feel about the people who leave, there is a certain efficiency to the disappearance, a relief on both sides that no one names out loud. I was not asking for streamers or a speech or even a cake. But I thought there would be a moment. A handshake at minimum. An acknowledgement that I had been there.

I packed my office in an afternoon.

Twenty-five years into fourteen boxes and three trips to the car and a walk down the hallway with a trolley and no one in the hallway and the fluorescent light doing what fluorescent light always does, indifferent, buzzing faintly, illuminating without warmth.

Someone had taped a card to my door. Signed by six people. A gift card to a bookstore, fifty dollars, because what do you give a woman who spent her career surrounded by books and now you are giving her back the books as though they are a consolation prize for the years she spent building something that will continue without her name on it.

I said thank you. I meant it. I drove home.

I want to tell you that I was fine. I was, mostly. The grief was not for the institution. The institution had made its feelings clear over twenty-five years in the small ways institutions make their feelings clear, through what they fund and what they don’t, through whose name goes on the award and whose goes on the course shell, through the door that opens for some people and stays narrowly ajar for others.

The grief was for the version of me who arrived the first time believing that if she worked hard enough the door would open all the way.

She deserved a better goodbye than fourteen boxes and a fifty-dollar gift card.

She deserved someone to say: we see everything you did here. We see what it cost you. We are sorry it took so long for you to know that your leaving would leave a shape.

I drove home and put the boxes in the hallway and made tea and sat in my chair and outside the window the trees were doing what trees do in October, releasing what they no longer need, slowly, without apology, gold and red and gone.

I thought: I have something to learn from that.

The Last Thanksgiving She Remembered Everyone

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I did not know at the time that it was the last one.

That is the particular cruelty of it. You do not get a sign. There is no way to stand in the kitchen at a particular Thanksgiving and know that this is the one to hold on to, this is the one where everyone’s name is still in place, where the faces around the table are still landing correctly in the mind of the woman at the head of it, where she moves between them with the ease of someone who has the whole room mapped, who knows exactly who is sitting where and what they need and what they find funny and what subject not to raise at dinner because it will take forty minutes to resolve.

She knew us all that year. I know that now.

I have been going back through that Thanksgiving in my memory the way you go back through a document looking for something you should have noticed, running my attention over the details of it. She told a story about her own mother. She laughed at the right moments. She held the baby and looked at the baby with the face that knows exactly who it is holding. She looked around the table at the end of the meal with the look of a woman taking an inventory she loves, counting what she has, and the count was right, everyone present, everyone accounted for, the whole gathered thing intact.

I am glad I was paying attention.

Not because I knew. But because paying attention is something I have been practising, the sustained, present, unhurried attention to what is actually in front of me, and that year I was better at it than I had been in previous years, and so I have more of that Thanksgiving than I would have had if I had been somewhere else in my mind, which I often was, which I am trying to be less.

She is still here. The Thanksgivings are still here, different now but present.

I bring the same attention I was practising that year. I keep practising it. The attention is what I have left to give when other forms of giving are harder, and I give it as fully as I can, every time, because every time might be the one I will need to go back to.

The Hormones Nobody Talks About

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Let me just say it plainly because no one else seems to want to.

Something happened to my body in my late forties and it was not gradual and it was not gentle and it was not the dignified transition that the one pamphlet in the waiting room made it sound like, the pamphlet with the silver-haired woman in a linen shirt looking serenely out at a garden as though what was happening inside her was a seasonal adjustment rather than a full-scale reorganization of everything she had taken for granted about her own nervous system.

I woke up one night in January convinced the house was on fire.

It was not on fire. I was on fire. There is a difference but at two in the morning it is not as clear a difference as you would hope. I stood at the open window in my February garden in my t-shirt at two a.m. explaining to no one that I was fine, I was just warm, this was a normal thing that happened to women and I had known it was coming and I was prepared. I was not prepared. Nothing prepares you for the specific quality of your own body becoming a weather system you did not consent to inhabit.

And then there was the rest of it.

The way the anxiety arrived differently, not the familiar anxiety with its known shape and its known triggers but a free-floating version, untethered, a low hum of alarm with no source address, which I had to learn to recognize as biochemical rather than informational, had to learn to say to myself: this is your body in transition, not your life in crisis, they are different things and you are allowed to know the difference. The sleep. The fog on certain mornings where the thinking that had always been easy required effort, where I would reach for a word and the word would be elsewhere, unavailable, and I would stand in the kitchen holding the fact of the word’s absence and think: is this who I am now.

It was not who I am now.

It was a passage. Uncomfortable, lengthy, poorly documented in the literature available to women who are not interested in suffering quietly and calling it natural. I came through it. I want to say that to whoever is in the middle of it right now, awake at two in the morning at the open window, wondering if this is the new permanent. It is not the new permanent. It is the passage. You will come through it. You are not losing yourself. You are, improbably, becoming more yourself. The woman on the other side of it is harder to rattle. She has been through the fire, literally, and she is still here, and she knows things the silver-haired woman in the linen shirt in that waiting room pamphlet did not tell you.

She is not afraid of her own heat anymore.

The Grief That Has No Name

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There is a kind of grief that does not come with a date attached to it.

Not the grief of a loss you can point to, a death or a leaving or a door that closed on a specific afternoon in a specific month. That grief is terrible but it has a grammar. It has a before and an after. It has something you can tell people when they ask what happened, a sentence that accounts for the size of what you are carrying. That grief is recognized. People bring food for that grief. People give you weeks, sometimes, before they ask when you will be back.

The grief I mean is the other kind.

The grief of a life that did not go the way you had it planned when you were young enough to have it planned. The grief of the version of yourself that did not happen, that was real enough in your imagination that its absence has weight. The grief of a relationship that did not end, that is still there, that still contains love, but that changed shape at some point into something that no longer fits who you have become, and you are carrying both the love and the not-fitting and there is no occasion for that grief, no ceremony, no one will bring food.

You are just carrying it alongside everything else.

I have learned to name it when it surfaces. To say: this is grief. Not sadness, which is smaller and more temporary. Grief. The real word. The word that says: something was here and is less here now and I am allowed to notice that and I do not need to resolve it today or explain it to anyone or be done with it on a schedule.

Grief does not need a date to be legitimate. It does not need a visible event. It does not need to make sense to someone else to be real.

I am learning that. Slowly, the way I learn the hard things, by having to relearn them, by having to come back to the same understanding from different angles over years until it finally settles into something I can carry without having to set it down and pick it back up every few months.

The grief is allowed to be nameless and still be real. I am allowed to carry it and still be fine. Both things. At the same time. That is the whole of the practice.

The Hospital Bag I Packed for Her

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I knew what to put in it because I had packed one before, for myself, for the births, for the two mornings when I stood in my own house at four a.m. or five a.m. and zipped a bag and knew that I was going somewhere I would not come back from the same.

I packed hers on a Sunday evening.

I stood in her bedroom and I opened the drawers that I know as well as my own now, from the years of helping, and I chose the nightgown she would want, the one she considers suitable for being seen in, because she is a woman who has opinions about being seen even in a hospital bed, especially in a hospital bed, the dignity of a well-chosen nightgown as one of the last things she can still control and she will control it. The slippers. The cardigan for the cold of air-conditioned corridors. The small photograph she keeps on her bedside table that I wrapped in her cardigan so it would not break.

I packed the photograph without asking her.

I knew she would want it. Forty years of watching her I know what she would want before she says it, the way you come to know the person you love best, not by asking every time but by accumulation, by the slow building of a knowledge that lives in the body rather than the mind, that is faster than asking, that arrives before the question does.

She looked at the bag when I brought it and said: you remembered my cardigan.

Not a question. A recognition. She has always been cold in hospitals, has always needed the extra layer, has mentioned it every time, and I remembered, and the remembering was the only language available to me in that moment, the language of attention paid over years, the language of having shown up enough times that the cardigan is something I know without being told.

I zipped the bag and put it by the door.

I sat with her for an hour after. We watched the program she likes. We did not talk about the bag or the morning or what would happen when we got there. We watched the program and I held her hand when the commercial came and she let me, which is not always something she lets me do, and the letting was its own kind of language, its own kind of answer to everything I did not say and she did not say and both of us understood anyway.

The Friendships That Survived

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Not all of them did.

That is the honest accounting. Some friendships are built for a particular season and when the season ends the friendship ends with it, not badly, not with a rupture, just with a gradual quieting, the calls getting farther apart, the silences getting more comfortable in the wrong direction, until the friendship becomes a person you used to know and still think of warmly and would be glad to see and do not see, and the not-seeing is a small grief that you carry without ceremony because there is no ceremony for the friendships that simply fade.

But some survived.

The ones that survived are different from the ones that faded, and the difference is not about how long they lasted or how much history they contain but about a quality I am trying to name precisely. A kind of room-making. The friends who survived are the ones who made room for all the versions of me, who received the burned-out version and the rebuilding version and the version who was figuring out what rest meant and the version who went to Mexico by herself and came back changed, and who did not require me to be the same version they had known before in order to stay.

I have three of those.

Three people who have been present through the whole arc, not every moment of it, not without their own absences and my own absences and the long stretches that the busy years carved out of the consistent contact, but present in the way that matters, in the you-are-still-my-person-whatever-the-distance way, in the way that means when I call unexpectedly on a Tuesday the voice at the other end is genuinely glad.

I do not take them for granted.

That is something I know now that I did not know in the years when I was too busy to tend the friendships properly, when I assumed they would maintain themselves because they always had, when I let them run on the goodwill accumulated from the years before without depositing anything new. I know now that the friendships that survive are the ones you show up for. They do not survive on their own. They survive because someone, sometimes you, sometimes them, keeps showing up.

I am showing up. More than before. As much as I can. It is not enough and it is more than it was and I am grateful for every Tuesday voice that is genuinely glad.

The Granddaughter Who Has My Eyes

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My mother noticed first.

On a clear day, one of the clear days, she was holding the baby and she looked up and said: she has your eyes. And then she looked at me and she looked at the baby and she said: and mine. And she was right. There is something in the shape of them, in the particular way they track movement, already purposeful, already watchful in the specific watchful way that seems to run in us, the watching that is how we have always understood the world before we had the words for it.

Four generations of eyes in one room.

I stood there and felt the line of it, the actual physical line, the specific genetic thread that runs from my mother’s face through mine and into my child and now into this new child who is just beginning to understand that there is a world worth watching. The thread is visible. You can see it in the photographs if you put them side by side, which I have done, which is a thing that grandmothers apparently do, I have become a woman who puts photographs side by side looking for family resemblance and finding it and feeling something about the finding that I do not have a word for but that sits somewhere between pride and grief and gratitude and wonder.

She is going to be a watcher.

I can already see it. The way she tracks the ceiling fan and the window and the face that comes into her field of vision, the way the watching has intention in it already, even now, even this young, the eyes of a person who is going to pay attention to the world, who is going to notice things, who is going to make meaning out of what she sees in her particular and unrepeatable way.

I hope someone tells her, someday, that the watching is a gift.

That the noticing is a gift. That being the kind of person who pays attention is worth the cost of it, which is sometimes considerable, which is sometimes the full price of being in a world that offers more than you can hold. It is worth it. The watching is worth it. I would tell her now but she is four months old and the words are years away.

My mother is watching her watch the ceiling fan.

Three women watching. This is what the line looks like. This is where it goes. I am so glad to be in the middle of it.