This is How My Caregiving Journey Started
I wanted her to die because I couldn’t stop her from dying.
The disease continued to take more from her as it asked more of me. I would lie in bed at night with her by my side, wondering how this would end. How could it end sooner? How could she be spared this forgetting spiral? How could I be spared the inevitability of caregiving? How could it end sooner?
I couldn’t imagine her dying. I couldn’t imagine her not dying. I couldn’t imagine living without her, alone.
I felt numb.
Yet the mind delivered daily doses of anxiety with a thin veneer of sanity that thinned with each passing day.
The broken heart released waves of sadness, hurt, anger, fear and shame.
How does one extricate from an entangled relationship when you can’t imagine being abandoned? The little deaths of loneliness, bewilderment and grief day after day.
When every photograph, scribbled note, discarded lipstick brings rivulets of anguish, when you doubt the pleasure of memories.
When pain washes all color from your world.
When you feel a thousand pounds overweight and every step is a slog over sucking mud.
When the bed is not a respite but the raw memory of loneliness. Where there was once the touch of warm sweet flesh, now lives a sea of emptiness, cool and unloving.
When you wish for a car built for one so you wouldn’t see an empty seat next to you. When every chore is referenced to what she would have done. When you buy for one. Cook for one. And the fridge gradually empties. And the cupboards become bare. And you realize her has went.
How does one know the endness of Death?
What remains after Death takes your loved one? Fear. A scattering of broken, hearts hopes and dreams. The bliss of deep sleep to forestall the terror of morning.
What remains of love, in an empty room?
Though this is how my caregiving journey began, this is not how it ended.
If you’re a caregiver having difficulty in this role, feeling alone, frustrated and tired with no peers to share your experiences, on a rollercoaster ride of doctor calls and appointments, bouncing between good news and bad news, having more questions than answers, suffering as you’ve seen others suffer, having tried what everyone has said to try but to no avail, then you may be ready for a fundamentally different approach.
