Advice for Future Corpses_and Those Who Love Them by Sallie Tisdale

Author:Sallie Tisdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2018-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Hello, caregiver: you are so tired. You need time to be alone, even if it’s just in a corner of the house where you can rest, or a chance to go to a coffee shop for an hour or two. You need time to talk to someone else, about other things, in another room. The dying person may not want to talk anymore, may not want you near, but he doesn’t want to be alone. You can’t leave. What you need most is all the help you can get. Ask for it. Accept it. Night may be the scariest time: long, spooky hours filled with questions. Night, when you are the most worn and just want to be home or need to be caring for children and doing laundry and getting ready for work—this is when the person needs you the most. They need you to be there, and they need you to be willing to be silent or talk or listen or read out loud or stand vigil. They need you to be ready. Get help, so that you can be.

Here at the threshold, one has trouble finding solid ground. The world is as shaky as a crumbling cliff at times, as still as the bottom of a well at others. Kate Carroll de Gutes took care of her mother through a years-long marathon of dementia, moving, surgery, unhealing wounds, and intensive care units, until her mother finally began to die. And then Kate took care of her while she died.

“Death is like this: it’s exhausting is what it is,” she wrote. “Everything feels like a huge fucking emergency. Why is that brown Camry torturing me by driving two miles per hour under the speed limit? Why did the Union Cab taxi dispatcher take thirty minutes to call me back to tell me the cab wasn’t coming? Why! Is! The! God! Damned! Internet! So! Slow!” She couldn’t describe what she was feeling for a long time. “I didn’t understand how the liminal space that the dying person is in can affect your own psyche.” She got lost driving home, forgot appointments, even forgot her age. (“Was I twenty-one or forty-one? Was I here or there?”)

Everything alters; time stretches and recedes; nothing happens. Suddenly a lot seems to be happening. Then nothing happens again. Dying is like this: we walk together down the road, side by side, or one leading the other, until the road diverges into two. We stand there for a while together, waiting. Then a person turns to walk down one path while the rest of us head down the other. We watch her go. We wave, we call out her name, but she doesn’t look back. The time comes when the dying person doesn’t want to chat about the news or the kids or your job. There is nothing else anymore but this solitary walk.

Kate gradually learned how to be in that world, the incomparable world of a dying person, and she learned this the way

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