One moment your world is excitingly large—brimming with potential—you have places to go, people to see. In the next, like a hastily-crafted stage set, it contracts to a 7’x10’ space where you wrestle with a disobedient body that fights tooth and nail for the right to tie her own pajamas.The caregiver’s time is sliced into manageable portions—assembling meal trays. Dispensing medication. Exercising limbs twisted with the winds of time. Walking the patient between bedroom and bidet, and listening to the shuffles and the groans, the minutiae of activity that keep her informed of her condition. Her inner life, on the other hand, is not always manageable. It is a drenching, dousing cesspool of longings, resentments, and sheer terror.And even as she performs her duties, the caregiver grieves preemptively for the loss of her patient. Because grief has its own timetable.
What choice does a caregiver have?
This too shall pass—a phrase that is as familiar as it is wise.There are those who face wars, survive accidents, are caught in house fires. It is callous to tell a person in distress, that others have suffered more. That is not my point. My point is that one way or the other this season of piss, this tour of duty, of watching the tick-tock oscillation of the clock in the hallway, will like everything else, pass. The caregiver carries this knowledge.It gives her the courage she needs, not just for caregiving but in surmounting all the challenges life throws at her.
Resilience is a quality of faith: Inner growth is not like having an epiphany. It takes work. It takes steady, daily resolve. The first lessons I learned on my mother’s lap and in the moral science class in elementary school, had to do with kindness. “Do unto others...” you know the golden rule.Those suffering from dementia, memory loss, the natural progression and humiliations of aging, deserve our kindness. To treat them in any other way says more about our failings than theirs—after all, they cannot help what is happening to them. It takes a special kind of faith to wake up, day after day, and find the strength, the resilience to carry on.
Day after day, the caregiver learns resilience from her patient.
Empathy, the loving balm: There may be days, the caregiver is sullen. Sometimes petty or even impolite. She is after all, human.But, she sees fit to correct herself. To realise that it is her humanity that sets her apart from other creatures. Her strength lies in trying. Moreover, when you are physically thrown together with the elderly, you have a choice. You can either attend to their physical welfare and leave them alone, or you can go the extra mile and tend to them then sit at their feet and listen to their stories. Without the comfort blanket of an app. Within touching distance.
How hard they loved, how well they lived, how profoundly they regret, how well they have healed—look into their eyes and you will no longer see a disembodied version, a caricature or a graphic of who they are, you will see instead, stories and life lessons in the creases on their face, the sloping of their shoulders, the buckling of their knees and the trembling of their voice. The caregiver is perhaps the last relic of life before social media—she sees her patient as a real person with a history. Empathy requires that you do not scroll through lives. That you may hold in your heart a punji of those stories. The true reward.
When you make your every act an act of love. When you no longer think of caregiving as a duty. Or as a burden. Or as a Lakshman rekha between you and your private yearnings, but see in the elderly a glimpse of yourself on some future canvas, then you have crossed over to another state, a state of momentary awareness. And is that not the message? The raison d’être?
Poonam Chawla’s new book The Slow Disappearing is based on the real-life story of a reluctant caregiver to a parent in the throes of dementia