Be With by Mike Barnes
Author:Mike Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-07-30T19:40:18+00:00
Dear –—
Be with yourself.
If not first, then at least not last. Certainly not dead last.
•
Airplane survival, people will say to you (you may get sick of hearing it). Save yourself first, or how can you save anyone else?
It’s fair advice, but unlikely to be adopted soon by anyone so constituted as to be a long-term caregiver.
You’ve always been adept at putting others’ needs ahead of your own. In the burning airplane, you’re more apt to save your seatmate, then the other passengers, then the cabin crew, and then try to settle the screaming pilots—your own self-preservation instincts seeing you no further than the occasional gulp from a dangling oxygen mask as you rush between the smoking, pitching rows…
It isn’t pretty. It isn’t conducive to a long or easy life. But neither does it make you a monster or a freak.
While you’re trying to reform yourself a little—yes, by all means, add that to your list—spare a moment to reflect that there are worse ways to be.
Me first wrecks far more planes and passengers. Perhaps even the one you’re in.
•
It’s obvious to you by now that this is not the place for exhaustive practical advice on the minutiae of caregiving. What Sundowner’s is and how best to handle it. How to avoid excessive bruising and skin tears. The pros and cons of a mechanical cat. Plenty of that exists—in books and articles, in online posts, most helpfully in tips passed on from other caregivers. Magpie up as much of it as helps. Work up your patch. A good caregiver is a matchless student.
I will be content if, reading these, you feel a little stronger about who you are and what you are doing. About the absolute importance of even the smallest acts of care, and the excellence that adheres to them.
Core strength: the kind you do planking for.
This is meant as planking.
•
There is a message caregivers often get and seldom read. Even more seldom, believe. Almost never remember.
Why not retrieve it tonight from whatever deep pocket or drawer you shoved it in? You still know where—you didn’t throw it away, after all. Unfold the torn and grimy slip.
You did good, it says.
And you did.
•
In Oasis, her home for the next thirty-nine months, Mary’s battle with dementia became much more visibly pitched. It became violent in the broadest and deepest sense. A last stand (if a last stand can last years).
Ferocious scenes. Harsh measures. Vile encounters.
Screams, yells. Weeping. Curses.
Glaring into the dark, rage smoldering unquenchable.
Torn things. Ripped. Dirty wads. Broken shards. Cuts, unexplained. Bruises. Broken bones. Lesions that don’t heal, or heal slowly and regrow. Brown stains on the floor, huge puddles. Abject, exhausted sleeps. Broken things. Broken people.
The list goes on forever, and it did.
I had the appalled sense that Mary was in a cage match with dementia. A contest gladiatorial and to the death, with no tactic disallowed and no quarter given. (No rest for the wicked, she used to say, ironing in her kitchen amid the slosh-and-spin of
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