I was the caregiver for my Mom for nine years prior to her passing this past February.
She was ninety-five years old. And before you, like every hospital nurse and doctor say with that time-to-go swagger, “Well…she is ninety-five!”, age doesn’t make the pain less important or the loss less evident. When you lose someone you have physically cared for you not only lose that person but you lose the job that consumed you, the routines you gave yourself to, the tasks, however unpleasant, that you learned to do because no one else was there to do them, because that is what caring is.
I was lost. In the moment of the last breath, I had become a phantom ship at sea, knowing how to steer but with no longer any clue which course to sail. I turned to the words of Thomas Jefferson writing to his good friend, John Adams, on the passing of his wife Abigail:
"I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicine."
The work of caring for another is sacred work. It's not something you can learn by watching, and takes far more than a few days. I often found my life was monk-like, in isolation, but it’s in the mundane unpleasant moments where you find the holiness. There is nothing in life as important as accompanying someone in care. Nothing. It challenges faith, and sometimes creates false hope, but as St. Paul would say, it is the love that is created that is the greatest of these.
With Jefferson’s words as my lighthouse, I made my way north to Gloucester, MA, to retreat with the Jesuits, where I sat in sacred silence for 8 days. Silence, as Jefferson knew, was the only balm and the only healing prescription. Applied liberally over time you can again gain control of the rudder, can begin to see through the fog, and make your way, carefully, back to port. And whenever you arrive, there are no timetables, you will know you have been changed, and that the work of life IS work, and that it begins again.
