In gathering my thoughts and reflections on caregiving each month, little epiphanies keep springing up. Some of these ideas are obvious (caregiving is a tough job), while other ideas are surprising with their insights and arrive at only certain times, no sooner.
Let me set the stage.
Steps Along the Way
I have written much about the personal challenges and fears involved in being a caregiver, but ultimately, caregiving is about relationships.
All relationships are fair game. Parent/child is obviously common, but siblings, significant others, etc. – all are wrapped up in caring for another.
I know I had not considered taking care of Dad as a vehicle for coming to terms with our complicated relationship, but it was.
Some of the relationship work took place before his final decline. Conversations full of male verbal shorthand in which we shared feelings about where we had been together and concerns about the looming future. Conversations that paved the way for regret-free memories that I cherish to this day.
Final Step?
We tend to think of death as the final step in most relationships, but is that fully true?
The one being cared for is gone but, as I have come to find, there are ghosts, so to speak.
Funeral done and everyone goes back to their lives but there are lingering thoughts, doubts, and replaying of remembered conversations.
Caregiving was the vehicle that carried us to a final stage in the personal relationship, but death presents us to the last one. The homework in this stage is purely optional, and there is lots of it, but I encourage any caregiver to pursue it.
As with the denouement of any story, it is in the examination of the events leading up to the present that a sense of wholeness results. We were fragmented and challenged on several fronts for the duration of caring for another, now is the opportunity to heal and grow from the experience.
Finding Meaning
Death of a loved one takes us to the stage where we can work just a little more to find the peace and acceptance that was so long in the making.
Think of it as talking with the dead.
Especially if it was a parent, their final transition removes the last of the lies we told ourselves growing up. We let go of those long-guarded concerns we carried over the years.
Some of the insights will surprise you.
Coming to terms with the conflicts and affections that every relationship embodies, quietly completes a part of us we thought we would never repair.
Enjoy the journey too. This is the last one you need to take with this person.
We become whole by losing someone.
Yes.
We become whole.
“No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it”
― Paulo Coelho
Dad's Back 