The Edge after Happiness: Imagining inside the mind of the caretaker
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
I’ll be thinking about this all day. Having been a nurse all my working life, I have intimate knowledge of what it means to be a paid scheduled caregiver. On the personal side, not so much. Now I’ve reached that age, 85, when I’m needing a bit of care myself. Someone cleans, does the laundry, ferries me where I need to be, does all the shopping. My big jobs are cooking the evening meal and folding the warm laundry, brought to me straight out of the dryer. I used to be responsible for all those domestic things plus holding down a job. Despite physical decline, my mind is still intact. Whatever else slows me down, I’m still capable of critical thinking.
ReplyDeleteAnd for all that I am thankful. I don’t know where my future lies, but it won’t be in the memory unit of a nursing home. At least I don’t think it will.
Much love,
Ann
"ingrained duty" describes her later years with your father perfectly! I would say fiercely ingrained duty even when it seemed too much for her. That is a truth and she was able to do it because she also remembered his unconditional love. No matter anything, absolutely anything, he loved her totally and completely. Before I met her I thought she was a figment of his imagination, no woman could be that perfect.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this touching and accurate tribute to caregiving in a committed relationship.
ReplyDeleteThe phrase "if you look down or back, you risk falling" resonates deeply. If one dwells on almost anything, including "if only," "I should have...," "I should not have...," one will end up in a very bad fix. This goes for intense and ongoing caregiving in any close relationship where there has been a reciprocal commitment to the other's happiness and well-being, such as a close sibling relationship.
Amanda, your poetry has pierced me right to the soul. I can relate to this on the basis of a common experience with you: my father had a debilitating stroke when I was 14 years old. My mother chose to bring him home and do the caregiving herself, since she was disgusted at the neglect that was occurring in the hospital setting. For eleven years she cared for him, before another massive stroke took his life. During that time, she raised us four children who were aged 5 to 16 at the time of the first stroke. She could not go out to work because she had to be at home, and there was no outside help for her except for two modest disability pensions. She kept everything going, without complaint, and what a tragedy it was. Still, my parents were a shining example of a loving marriage.
ReplyDeleteBut - back to your writing - I want to say that you have given poignant insight into an even more universal experience than the emotional weight of caregiving, as what you have said applies to the life of each one of us. We are all going down the path of time, where hardships and sickness, and the difficulties of aging itself, will challenge us. We are all caretakers for our family, our friends, and certainly ourselves. Our fragile bodies can hold the most heroic spirit and strength to carry on to the end, seeking meaning the entire way.
Caregiving is difficult enough, it demands that we reach deep down into our love and empathy to places we never expected to have to go. For strokes it can be particularly painful because very often the person we knew and loved is no longer there, sometimes even replaced by someone we would rather not know. But thankfully, love is enduring and powerful, it can provide us the strength to carry loads we never would have believed we could manage. "The meadow is sweet but absent" tells the whole story, what a beautiful summation of where we all might be one day. Thank you Amanda.
ReplyDeleteAmanda, what you've written is so spot on. My caregiving role for my husband my mercifully (for us both) short, but even through it, I felt what you've described. When people said "you're so strong," I wanted to demonstrate that apparent strength with a slap upside their head. It's not strength -- it's just what you do. At least it's what women do.
ReplyDeleteThe sum of what you wrote within the poem form came from your narrative words of what your mother said, "...that man is long gone." Beautiful, thought-out, and intensely true. Thank you Amanda.
ReplyDelete