As a writer and sole caregiver for my 84-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer’s, An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family, piqued my interest. Writers produced the 19 essays gathered for this book, but more importantly, these essays were written by caregivers and those being cared for themselves with a no-holds-barred brutal honesty.
Under my current circumstances, I thought this book might bring me to tears with each story, but I was wrong. It’s the powerful honesty, written eloquently in all its vulnerability, that will grab your heart, reduce you to tears, cause you to chuckle, and in some cases infuriate you, as it did me.
These stories weren’t fiction fantasies or pretty pictures of caregivers being selfless martyrs, as some may think, and the patients weren’t patiently waiting to die; these were true accounts of people — parents, children, spouses, friends, and siblings — who while living life, being all they could be, were stricken with illness or injury and needed help.
Caregiving for the chronically or critically ill is not a pretty subject. These writers opened their homes, hearts, and minds and let out every ounce of love, fear, frustration, and anger and shared the trials and tribulations they felt during their caregiving journey.
Each essay had its own merits, story, and sense of need. Helen Schuman in her essay, My Father the Garbage Head, writes with poignant, heartwarming honesty of her father’s heart attack and strokes which led to his death.
Sam Lipsyte, in The Gift speaks openly and humorously about his drug abuse, how it wrecked his life, and while he “cleaned up his act” his mother let him move back in. Shortly after, his mother tells him and his sister that her breast cancer has recurred. He handled the news with a matter-of-fact acceptance that he would be her caregiver.
I was sort of relieved when I realized it was going to be me. Why knock yourself out trying to resuscitate your life when you can cling to somebody else’s. (12)Ann Harleman’s My Other Husband describes her husband' illness and the grueling bleakness and burden of MS.
MS is something that goes on happening — growing, changing, worsening — measurable not in weeks, months, or even years, but in decades. Something huge and black that descends slowly and inexorably and surrounds you. (21)Her heartfelt love showed in each of the slices of their life she describes before MS took over. Her friend told her, “With chronic illness, a lot of times the caregiver ends up dying first. Out of stress and exhaustion. I’ve seen it.” (28) After years, frustrated and worn, she finally decided to place him in a nursing home “for his sake and hers.”
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