No Saints around Here: A Caregiver’s Days

Preface

xi PREFACE Caregivers do not forget. My friend Barb and I were looking together at a realtor’s glossy brochure. It was filled with pictures of the house where my husband James and I had lived for twenty-five years. Two years after his death, I had finally acknowledged it was too big and expensive for me. For months I had worked feverishly to dismantle the stuff of our life together. Grab bars, wheelchair, walker, and hospital bed had long since vanished. As I prepared for sale, I needed to strip to the floorboards and a few pieces of furniture. Out went a chipped enameled stockpot James used for his signature fish soup. Ayoung architect, dear to us both, took James’s drawing board. I tossed out the oversize cup James liked to use for coffee. A bedside table he had designed, a wobbly reading lamp we had never replaced, travel posters, a whimsical painted wooden cat with a curly tail that made us smile—everything held a memory. I could dispose of the possessions but not the memories. “I like those chairs,” Barb said, pointing to a picture of two cushy, sagging, lemon-yellow blocks of foam in our upstairs bedroom. “Yes,” I agreed, “so did we. They were so comfy. We both liked to sit there and read.” A memory hit. “Remember my telling you preface xii about the stupidest thing I ever did when James was starting to have trouble with stairs?” Barb nodded. “Was that the time when he had a really hard time getting out of a deep chair and then once he was up, he panicked and couldn’t move? Is that the chair?” She remembered my story, how eventually I had to call a next-door neighbor to help wrangle James into his lightweight wheelchair and then down two dangerous flights of stairs to his hospital bed in a lower room. Of course I should have called the fire department for a “lift assist .” (See “The Last Christmas.”) “I can’t believe I did that,” I said. “He could have easily fallen out of his wheelchair on the stairs, and that would have been the end. I took such a chance. I was panicked too. I just didn’t think straight.” “I get it,” Barb said. “I took chances too. Shall I tell you about the dumbest thing I did with Jack?” Her husband had died six years ago. For half an hour, plunged back into what suddenly seemed like a very recent past, we shared stories. Of course Barb understood. I first met her after Jack’s death. Both men had struggled with Parkinson’s and eventual related dementia. Barb had cared for Jack at home. When James’s neurologist realized I insisted on trying that too, she put me in touch with Barb. I didn’t know what to expect. I was twenty years older than Barb, retired from academia, and too occupied with caregiving to continue writing. She was a successful administrator in midcareer, I knew little else about her, and I was not sure how she could help me. On the sunny July afternoon when I saw Barb walking briskly across the parking lot to my table at an outdoor café, I was even less sure. Tall and slender, she was elegantly dressed in a tailored suit, her hair curled impeccably into a softened helmet, and she carried an official-looking briefcase. I was wearing my usual outfit of well-washed jeans, long-sleeve wild-colored T-shirt, and dangly earrings. My hair felt straggly, and I kept ruffling my fingers through it. preface xiii Then Barb dropped her briefcase, slid onto the opposite chair, and reached out her hand. I took it. She looked into my eyes, and as I began to talk, haltingly at first, telling her how long James had been ill, how I wasn’t sure what would happen next, how I didn’t see how to manage, her eyes filled with tears. “I know,” she said over and over. “I know.” We soon became close friends. I grew to depend on an hour’s visit with her almost weekly at a coffee shop we could both reach quickly—for different reasons, both of us had almost no spare time—and I could tell her anything. “You can do this,” she would say over and over. “You will know when you can’t...