Two things we all became experts in during those last five years: taking care of my mother and worrying. We were authorities; we worried all the time, about everything. The better prepared and dedicated you are, the more you are likely to worry. Because you can’t cover off on every angle or option, no matter how much contingency you’ve built into each possible scenario.
As she got progressively sicker, the opportunities for discomfort (hers) and failure (ours) expanded at a rate that fed off our fears. So we worried. I’ve since seen people who have been obliged to care for a spouse or parent by themselves and I wonder how this burden is not literally debilitating.
Perhaps not surprisingly, as things became increasingly dire toward the end, time slowed down and the options and possibilities narrowed. Eventually the only concern was making her as comfortable as possible. Let her find peace was the ceaseless recitation I repeated like a monk those last few weeks.
And myself? You don’t ask for peace, you search for it and hope for it (some people pray for it). No one is capable of giving it to you even, or especially if you are willing to pay for it. There are a lot of immutable truths we are fortunate to discover before time runs out, and this is one of them.
The one relief, once it’s finally over, is the realization that there is nothing more to worry about. Except for all the other things you have to worry about. I quickly developed an intense (irrational?) fear concerning the death of another loved one. Was this possible? (Of course it was.) Was this likely? (Of course it wasn’t.) You suddenly become intolerably (irrationally?) sensitive to the prospect –not to mention the inevitability– of the other parent dying, or your sibling dying. Or (awful, irrational) your sibling’s children. And then, even if you eventually get a handle on those apprehensions, there is still the disconcerting specter of your own inevitable death.
For a long while there is no respite, because the same things that placate and distract also remind us: friends will get ill and die, pets, friends’ pets, friends’ families, and so on down the hellish rabbit hole.
My family worried about me. In fairness, I worried about them as well. This is what families do, especially under duress.
The sister worried about her brother. He is all by himself, she thought. How can he stand it? He is his own best friend, she knew, and that is good. Mostly she marveled at the peace and perseverance he had cultivated (when, exactly, had that growth occurred? Or had it happened while she was busy building—and worrying about—her own family?). She could not help worrying about him and his resolve: where did it come from, and would it possibly last. Could it?
The daughter worried about her father. All that he had seen; what he would have to face, possibly alone, as he faced down old age. She worried about him getting sick; having to take care of him. She worried about all the husbands and sons and daughters who had no idea what to expect (they did not even know what was coming; no one does—even, or especially the ones who think they do); even the ones who were able to avoid this particular path. If it wasn’t this it was something else; nobody escaped some type of ultimate unpleasantness. She worried about herself: even though it was over it was only just beginning. And then there was her husband and her kids to think about. And worry about.
Our father may have been worried or he may have been too busy trying to put one day in front of another. You do that enough times and a week goes by, then a month, then a year. And all that time you might have spent worrying you could have been living. It’s enough, sometimes, just to live.
I worried because I knew something neither of them understood: I had by far the easiest burden to carry. I worried for all sorts of reasons about all sorts of things, but mostly I acknowledged how much easier things were for me. My sister had little kids to contend with. On days she couldn’t pull it together she had to pull it together. This is, of course, what got her through it. You make enough beds and meals and give enough baths and change enough diapers and suddenly your children are older (so are you) and your grief has abated.
I worried, above all, about my old man, because he had it hardest. Aside from nursing his pain and worrying about his children, he had the responsibility of learning how to survive. It was him, not us, who still had to live in that house. He had to walk past that room, see that bed, use that shower, open that refrigerator, pull into that garage, mow that lawn, open that mailbox, read those letters, write those checks, watch that TV, go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night not certain, for a second that might last too long, if he was alone.
*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone
