Sheli Monacchio

Blog

  • The Third Line

    I have worked with the same man for years. His wife is living with dementia. She is in memory care now, and he is still at home. He visits her, then drives back to a house full of her things.

    He likes to have control. I say that with real affection, because that instinct is a big part of how he has held his family together.

    We were talking about something he had been turning over for weeks. I told him what I have told him before, gently, because it needed saying again: this one is outside your control.

    He smiled and said he had a quote for me, from Mickey Rivers, the old Yankees centerfielder:

    “I don’t get upset over things I can’t control, because if I can’t control them, there’s no use getting upset. And I don’t get upset over things I can control, because if I can control them, what’s the use in getting upset?”

    We both laughed. It’s good logic. Sitting there, though, I realized it skips a step.

    I have been quoting a different version of this for years:

    God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

    The first line asks for peace. The second asks for nerve. The third line asks you to tell them apart, and that is where most of us get stuck.

    Almost nobody I sit with lacks courage, and almost everyone is capable of acceptance. What trips us up is sorting. We pour energy into a coworker’s attitude, a grown child’s choices, a sister’s marriage, and while we’re busy with all that, the one thing we could act on sits there waiting. Mickey Rivers assumes you already know which pile everything goes in. Most of us don’t. Sorting takes wisdom, and wisdom is slow.

    Then our conversation turned, the way the good ones do.

    He told me his emotions had been all over the place. Up one hour, flattened the next, angry about something small, fine again by dinner.

    I said, “That’s grief. You’re grieving.”

    He looked at me the way people do when a word lands somewhere unexpected. Nobody had died. He sees her. She is right there.

    Grief starts the moment the losing starts. It can go on for years, and it arrives in plenty of places besides a funeral: a marriage that changed, a friendship that drifted, a parent who isn’t who they were, a version of your life that didn’t happen. Nobody sends flowers for those. People tell you how well you’re holding up, and you grieve on your own.

    That was the most useful thing I said all afternoon, and it was one word. When someone’s feelings are all over the place, giving the feeling its true name can be the kindest thing you do for them. It tells them they make sense.

    He sat with that, then admitted he hadn’t reached acceptance yet.

    I wanted him to hear this, and I want you to hear it too: acceptance arrives when it arrives. You can’t schedule it or talk yourself into it on a deadline. It means you have stopped fighting the fact that something is true, and that’s all it means. You can accept something and still wish with your whole heart it were different.

    That afternoon I noticed something I had somehow missed for years. The serenity prayer and the stages of grief end on the same word, acceptance. One says it in the language of prayer and the other in the language of psychology. Both put it at the end of the road.

    So the next time you’re carrying something heavy, or sitting across from someone who is, try one question.

    Is this mine to carry?

    Notice which answer makes you uncomfortable. That’s usually where the wisdom is trying to get in.

    It was a meaningful conversation. I won’t forget it, and I don’t think he will either.

  • Still Holding On

    My father is eighty. I watched him for one afternoon and it wore me out.

    I spent the day with my dad recently, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that watching him move around that house made me tired.

    His wife, my stepmother, has significant mobility challenges. She would do everything herself if she could. She is that kind of person. But some things she simply cannot do, and so my dad does them. He sits down for two minutes and then he is back up to get her a glass of water. He sits down again and then he is up for something she cannot reach. He anticipates what she will need before she knows she needs it. He has been doing this for over thirty-five years. He knows her.

    Watching him, I thought: this man is a caregiver. A real one. The kind who does not call himself that, who would probably laugh if you used the word, but who has quietly built his entire daily rhythm around the needs of the person he loves.

    My dad had heart surgery not long ago. And while he is up and down all day taking care of her, she is taking care of him. She makes sure he takes his medication. She tracks his rehab appointments. She follows up with his doctors. She is his caregiver too, in a completely different form.

    She cannot get him a glass of water. But she can make sure he does not skip his cardiologist.

    They are caring for each other. At the same time. In entirely different ways.

    I drove home thinking about how narrowly we define this. We picture one person doing everything for another person who can do nothing. It is almost never that clean.

    Care comes in different currencies.

    That is the idea, and once you see it you cannot stop seeing it.

    The friend who never remembers your birthday but shows up within an hour when something goes wrong. The teenager who will not say a word at dinner and then quietly takes the trash out without being asked. The partner who does not talk about feelings and has changed the oil in your car every six months for twenty years.

    We keep score in the currency we happen to spend in, and then we conclude that the other person is not paying.

    It matters most where loss is involved. My stepmother has lost a great deal of independence. That loss is real and it is hard, and I will not minimize it. But inside that loss she still has purpose. She still has a role. She still contributes to the person she loves most.

    And my dad, who is exhausted and has his own health battles and never stops moving, is still held by her. Just differently.

    If you are caring for someone right now and it feels like all you do is give, I want to ask you something.

    What are they still giving you?

    What they are still giving, this week, in whatever currency they have left. Attention. Recognition. A hand that reaches for yours. Being glad you walked in.

    Find one. Then tell them you noticed it.

    Loss is part of this.

    The goal is the presence of each other inside it.

  • The Push-Up

    Three years of jujutsu, twice a week. The kid still cannot do a single one.

    I was standing on the sideline at soccer practice talking to a friend when he said something that stopped me cold.

    He was frustrated. Really frustrated. His son has been doing jujutsu twice a week for three years. Three years of showing up, paying for classes, driving across town. And the kid still cannot do one push-up.

    I laughed a little, because I recognized that feeling immediately.

    My son cannot wake up in the morning without me asking him thirty times. Thirty. I have counted. And in that moment, standing in the doorway for the fifteenth time with my voice rising and my patience entirely gone, I feel like I am failing. Like he is failing. Like something is fundamentally broken.

    His son, on that soccer field, holds his own against kids twice his size. He is strong. He is kind. He has a great heart and a great game. Every single week.

    My son is thirteen. He plays music. He is athletic and thoughtful and genuinely one of the most interesting humans I know.

    We were each taking one small, maddening moment and using it to define the entire person standing in front of us.

    The second I said that out loud, we both went quiet.

    Because we do this constantly. And not only with our children.

    We do it with the coworker who was short with us in one meeting. With the friend who forgot to call. With the spouse who left the same cabinet door open for the nine hundredth time. One moment gets promoted to the whole story, and the person disappears behind it.

    The moment is not the person.

    That is the tool. Six words.

    It matters most where the moments are hardest. If you are caring for someone living with dementia, you know exactly what I am describing. The repeated question. The resistance at bath time. The afternoon they did not recognize you. Dementia has a way of making one hard moment feel like the entire truth of a person.

    It is not.

    The one who raised you is still in there. The one who built a career, or had a laugh that filled a room, or made the best pie you have ever tasted. Still there, underneath the moment.

    Just like my friend’s son is not a push-up, and mine is not an unheard alarm clock.

    So here is what I would ask you to do this week.

    Think of the person you love who is testing your patience most right now, the one currently driving you up a wall.

    Write down three true things about them that have nothing whatsoever to do with the thing that is bothering you.

    Then say one of them out loud. To them.

    You will be surprised what that does to a room. And to you.

  • The Gold Paint

    My grandfather painted his furniture gold. I never understood it. It turns out I wasn’t supposed to.

    My grandmother’s house was a lot of things.

    Red carpet. Gold couches. Plastic on the gold couches, the kind that stuck to the back of your legs in the summer when you were wearing shorts. My brother and I despised those couches with every fiber of our being. There were also marble tables everywhere. I know this because both my brother and I cracked our heads open on them at separate points in our childhood. He was wearing a Fonzie shirt that said “Aaaaaaaaa” when it happened to him. I wish I were making that up.

    It was French provincial. It was gaudy. It was a lot. And it was entirely, completely hers.

    My grandfather had his own thing going on. He drove a Cadillac and he had taken the time to affix his initials in small gold letters on both doors. On the hood sat what he called a police dog, a German Shepherd hood ornament. And throughout the house, on the ornate carved wood of their bedroom furniture, he had carefully painted the decorative trim. In gold.

    I never understood it. Not once.

    What I understand now is this.

    My grandmother cared deeply about how things looked. Her home, her furniture, her appearance. She dressed to the nines every single day, purse matched to her dress, not a hair out of place. Keeping the plastic on those couches was pride. It was her way of saying: these things matter to me, and I will take care of them.

    My grandfather was an ornamenter. He took plain things and made them his. His initials on the Cadillac. Gold paint in the wood carvings. A German Shepherd on the hood because why not. He was signing them. Claiming them. Saying something about who he was that he may not have had the words for.

    I did not have to understand it. It was never mine to understand.

    It was theirs.

    I think about this nearly every day now.

    I think about it when a daughter tells me she does not understand why her mother keeps folding and refolding the same dish towel. I think about it when a father cannot fathom why his sixteen-year-old cares so much about something that seems to matter so little. I think about it when someone tells me their husband still gets up at five on a Saturday when nobody on earth is making him.

    We spend so much energy trying to decode the people we love. Why do they do that. Why does that matter to them. Why can’t they just.

    But understanding was never the assignment.

    Honor it. Don’t decode it.

    That is the tool. Four words. You can carry it out of here today.

    It matters most when someone is losing things. Meaning and purpose do not disappear with a diagnosis, or with age, or with a hard year. They go quiet. They change shape. They need someone willing to help find them again.

    If your person once loved to paint, we may not be able to hand them a canvas and walk away. But we can put a brush in their hand and sit down beside them. If they always cared about how they looked, helping them choose an outfit is everything. It is the whole person, still in there, still theirs.

    You do not have to understand why something mattered to them. You only have to honor that it did.

    Somewhere in your life right now there is a person doing something you do not understand. A ritual, a habit, a thing they care about far more than seems reasonable.

    This week, try this. Skip the why. Why sounds like a challenge, and people defend themselves against it.

    Ask them to tell you about it instead.

    Then listen to what comes out. It is almost never about the thing.

    My grandmother’s plastic couch covers were never for me. They were very much for her.

    And that was always enough.