The Loving Sacrifices of Caregiving

David pulled to the curb. "Should I take you home?"

I was grabbing my hair by the ends, yanking upward, a response that felt perfectly rational in the situation. We'd been married twenty-eight years. We'd just set out to buy last-minute supplies for our forty-person Christmas dinner when David informed me that he planned to move his mother into our house the following day.

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I cried. "I need to wait. We have to clean the house. We have to do Christmas."

"I can't keep this up," he said.

By 'this' he meant spending nights at his mother's home. Esther was ninety. A year earlier, after she left food burning on the stove, we started making her meals. She became fearful of being alone, but had trouble setting the alarm we'd installed in her home. So for months, David and our youngest son had been alternating stays, packing and unpacking every other day.

During that time, we knew she would need to live with us eventually, and began preparing, remodeling a bathroom to include a curbless shower, an extra tall toilet, grab bars. But the added holiday stress brought David to his breaking point. We were having a major marital crisis on the side of the road.

Decades previously, in a philosophy of religion course at UCLA, my professor discussed this early Christian argument: to love God with all one's being meant to focus on God at all times. That week in study section, the teaching assistant gazed out a window of Dodd Hall saying, "John loves Mary. If Mary's dog falls in the river, does John save the dog? Or stare adoringly at Mary?"

In my weekly assignment, I discussed Mary's child in imminent danger. So young myself, it never occurred to me that, on the outer edge of middle age, the crucible of love would turn from children and center upward, toward parents.

Though David and I had different cultural upbringings, Catholicism is a commonality. We left the church years ago, but still share a stew of guilt, superstition and sacred mystery. Challenges we don't fully comprehend are opportunities for spiritual refinement. To love David better, I turned my attention to his mother.

Esther moved into our home on December 23. We pulled off our Christmas dinner. 

So it came to be that I brought into my home a woman who could throw a 'chancla' (slipper) around the corner and hit her target. Or so David swears. Though frail, Esther retained her forceful personality, her command of guilt. Yet in strange moments — while driving her to medical appointments, altering her clothes to fit her ever shrinking frame, or snugging her chair up to the dinner table — I understood her sense of powerlessness and felt empathy. 

Esther loved our xeriscaped (with little irrigation) yard. Its sage, yucca, agave, kangaroo paws, and lantana attract hummingbirds and butterflies. In sunshine, she'd read or watch nature at its gentlest. I sometimes watched her watching. Seeing the serene, contemplative side of her reminded me that David hadn't grown up in a vacuum. 

During Esther's final years, my mom's dementia and my father's severe anemia accelerated. My sisters and I continuously increased meal preparation and chauffeuring to medical appointments.

Every Sunday, David, Esther, and I traveled fifty-five miles each way to visit my parents. David made dinner while our parents chatted in the living room. Nearby relatives had standing invitations to join us.

When Esther died, my sister brought my parents to the memorial. My father's spine was disintegrating. He was in too much pain to sit in a folding chair. I found him a wicker loveseat with thick cushions. When David thanked him for coming, my dad said, "I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Despite his pain, he wanted to show not only respect for Esther, but gratitude for all David had done for him, week after week. Grief for Esther and pangs of love for my family swirled with the constancy of David's love and my love for him. 

As my parents declined, I frequently spent nights with them as David had done with Esther. As their assisted-living community went into COVID lockdown, my dad was hospitalized with pneumonia, the result of congestive heart failure. My sisters and I registered as self-employed caretakers, giving us continued access to our mom, who depended on us for the high level of care she needed. 

After bouncing between the hospital and a nursing home for five weeks, my dad returned to the nursing home to die. We drearily awaited daily temperature checks, medication distribution, the knock on the door announcing the food carts. 

Since the dining room had closed, David — barred from the facility during lockdown — continued to send meals, simple things my mother would eat: spaghetti, meatloaf. 

My sister called on a Sunday night to say Dad was near the end. Worried about my emotional state, David offered to drive me, then stay in a nearby hotel. This seemed too much to ask. However, on my journey to face my father's death, I wished for the comfort of the passenger seat, of David's hand. 

I'd been reading Albert Camus' "The Plague," seeking connections to our own time. Many events in the book had equivalents in my life. Driving, I thought of the fictional couples separated by the closure of city walls. "This … separation enabled them to realize that they could not live apart." 

My periods of separation from David were shorter than those in the novel. But they, too, had delineated clearly our desire to live together. 'Til death do us part' now has meaning. Love is far from an abstract exercise for philosophy class. We know what it is to turn away and offer care that also reaches toward the beloved in a single act.