I was angry when I wrote this and I didn’t know it at the time. That’s usually how it works for me. I was expressing…good for writing…but then looking back, reading it over, not only did I feel my anger as I read, but I also felt something familiar that I’ve fostered. It’s a recognition of my own immaturity. I can sense it (sometimes) especiallly in my writing. There’s a vibe about it, not a good one. It’s a victim vibe, a feel sorry for myself and distract from the pain I’m feeling by lecturing and preaching. It makes me cringe when I read it and I feel ashamed…
But I’m posting it anyway. Because it’s on the path.
I think the point still comes across and I’ll bet you probably feel something reading this. It might be anger also, or shame or defiance, who knows…but we all do what I’m talking about and I think that’s what I don’t want to see. I don’t want to see my own failures in caring for people. I don’t want to experience the weakness I feel about those failures.
It’s so easy to be an observer and a judger. It’s much harder to be a participant and reporter, to be in the fray and not “above” it. I can tell when I write like this that I’m trying to stay “above” it. The irony, of course, is that the best I can do is fool myself. I’m never “above” it. I’m always reporting and participating, judging, caring and not caring. Only question is whether I allow my feelings and embrace my feelings and feel my feelings and allow them to be undeniable.
Sally would have told me how angry I sounded if she read this piece and we probably would have talked about it, she would have helped me explore and I would have seen I just feel so helpless about all the pain and loss in my life and in the world and in life. So helpless. So helpless to do anything so I choose to be angry because that feels a lot better than being helpless.
I’m sorry Sal. I’m sorry. I miss you. Miss you a lot.
Chapter 6 – No Heroes
I’ve chosen to take care of my wife. Although I’ve considered what it might be like if she was in a place, like a respite house or something outside the home, it’s never been something I’ve seriously considered. I can tell you that taking care of her can really suck. Anyone who’s in our cancer club knows this. Sure, you take the vows, till death do us part, in sickness and in health…but who thinks it’s really a thing? I didn’t. And I certainly didn’t marry the idea of having an adult infant. But I did. And so, I do. I do all the things I’ve heard are the reasons to send someone to a home, to send someone out of the house. I wipe the shit, I serve, I wake up, I transport, I lift and shift and feed and clean and change and do it again and again and again and again. I didn’t sign up for this.
Except…I did.
People seem to think what I’m doing is heroic.
I’m no hero. And I’m not humble, either.
I’m no hero.
(I AM VERY ANGRY IN THIS REVIEW IT AND GET UNDER THE ANGER TO BE MORE CLEAR)I am a man who took an explicit vow, but an implicit one too. If I am to send my closest friend away from me, away from her home, away from those that love her most…I am neither a friend nor a good human. The argument here is so deeply and darkly subversive and has been fully acclimated into the blood vessels of our society and morality, “of course, there is something more important than care for another human. My time.”
My time is more important than caring for another human. So much more important that I am willing to be the creator of a circumstance in which, in the darkest moments of human life, in the most frail and vulnerable moments, my closest person is alone. Not only am I not with her but she is not with me. She wakes to a foreign room, to foreign people standing over her. She wakes in the terror and pain of her life without a loved one within the distance of a soft voice. My time is not more important than that. In fact, I’ve come to see that my time is only important FOR that. This doesn’t mean I care well all the time. It doesn’t mean I don’t wish for the freedom of responsibility; it doesn’t mean I don’t need a fucking break…oh I do. It means that the baseline for being a human is recognizing that our time is all we have and if we don’t think it’s important enough to spend that time with a dying loved one (or even a family member) we have strayed from what it means to be human.
We have strayed and what’s worse, we’re at the point in our human story where we promote and justify NOT spending our most precious resource where it’s designed to be spent. We call baseline humanity heroic. Baseline humanity is not heroic and should not be celebrated as such. It’s like the example of rewarding your child for taking their first steps or going to the bathroom. Taking steps is a necessary point on the path of becoming a functioning body and going to the bathroom is a necessary step on learning how to use the tool of the body you’ve been given. What happens when we turn these baseline events into celebrations?
What happens when we turn baseline human care into heroic human care?
Everything gets destroyed. Everything. Our own experience of humanity, others experience of humanity, our experience of normal, our experience of care, our experience of heroism. Everything changes in a bad way. And our society, oh man, our society hungers for this destruction…and it’s happening folks.
NOT EDITED – CHECK BACK
Edited 2/10/24