Sheli Monacchio

Tag: Caregiving

  • 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.