The Edge after Happiness: Imagining inside the mind of the caretaker

One day towards the end of my father’s life, while he was still at home but no longer the man of whom my mother had thought on first meeting him, 'If he were to ask me to go to India with him tonight, I would go' — one day, six-decades-plus later, my friend J was helping my mother with some banking. J asked Mum something about how she was doing given Dad’s state of health — and Mum replied, 'Well, the man I would have gone to India with, without even knowing his name, that man is long gone.' 

By this point, Mum had been caregiver to Dad following a stroke about ten years prior and, though she never said a word to me or my siblings, she was obviously tired on many levels — fulfilling her duty, fine, but possibly no longer experiencing flutters of unfettered joy in the relationship. 

I never talked to my mother about the toll my father’s illness took on her (she was intensely private about such matters) and now that she is dead, I cannot ever have that conversation with her. 

Instead, I have written this piece that imagines what might have been on her mind and in her heart over those months and years. I wonder...

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The edge after happiness

If happiness is a wildflower meadow / the time beyond happiness  — when it lies in the rearview mirror — that time is a narrow mountain ledge-path that you have no choice but to walk along, looking ahead / never looking down or back, because if you look down or back, you risk falling, and falling will get you nowhere good  / though falling might solve the issue, if the fall takes you down, way down, to the end / but the risk is that you’ll survive the fall just enough to need the care that you have, until then, been giving / and that means that the one you have been caring for will be alone / and that prospect is not only unthinkable it is not survivable. 

Love is not the same thing as happiness, because the love persists even when the happiness is but a memory / and remembering is not always happy / precisely because that state no longer exists — need exists, the need to keep going / to honour the vows,  to respect the love,  to keep doing what we have always done: live,  love, and occasionally laugh…

The meadow is sweet but absent / the path is frightening but present — every minute of every day. Until the end is reached — who knows when that will be / we all begin / we all end  / and until we reach it, we can remember the happiness, the meadow / while treading carefully along the mountain ledge-path / no safety net, just ingrained duty (once happy commitment) to love, to desire, transformed now to care.

The grace — or is it a trick — is that it is not constant / there are glimpses of the former, the previous, the once-always / and those moments give hope, which fall as quickly off the mountain ledge-path as you catch yourself glorying in them / even while steeling yourself against  the steady march of days that bring the slow inevitable decline of the once mighty roar of a true love sparked by kindred spirits who found each other so happily all those years ago.

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A note on the formatting of this piece: Normally, I do not like justified text (stretched from one outer margin to the other, leaving uneven unexpected white spaces interspersed along the lines of text), but for this piece, it seems fitting.

I have long had this story in my mind, but it took the spark of a line from a poem, combined with a photo of the mountain-side path El Caminito del Rey in Spain, to get the words onto the page. The poem's line was, "Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding", from Yehuda Amichai's "Memorial Day for the War Dead". You can read the full poem here. You can see a photo of the cliff-side path here. 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo from Unsplash by Dani Franco