What Counts as Good Today

The last big thread in the conversation was about ability. Specifically, the declining physical activity of the people we are caring for. The walk that used to be a half hour is now ten minutes. The stairs that were doable last fall are not doable now. The grandchild visit that used to last an afternoon is wrapped up by lunch.

What several of us named is that the harder work, in these moments, is not the physical accommodation. It is the recalibration of expectations. Theirs and ours.

The body our loved one is in keeps doing less. Their idea of what they should be able to do often lags behind the body’s actual capacity. They are frustrated. They are sometimes embarrassed. They sometimes push themselves past what is safe, then crash, then push again.

We, meanwhile, have our own picture of what they used to do. We can still see them, in our minds, doing the gardening or the long walks or the cooking from scratch. When they ask if they did “enough” today and what we hear in the question is grief, we have to find an answer that is honest, generous, and grounded in what is actually true now, not last year.

The group’s quiet conclusion was this: a lot of what caregiving asks, late in the work, is the discipline of redefining “good.” Of helping the person we love say, yes, that counts. That was a good day. And of saying it to ourselves about our own days, too.

A few practices some caregivers find useful:

• Set the bar with the body that is in the room. What is a good day for the person they are this month is the only relevant question. Comparisons to last year, or to other people their age, are mostly cruel to both of you.
• Praise the doing, not the amount. You walked today is more useful than you walked further than yesterday. The first is true regardless of distance. The second sets up the next day to be a disappointment.
• Help them name what counts. Some loved ones need a little coaching to find the win. Today you got dressed. Today you ate a full meal. Today you laughed at something on TV. Saying it out loud helps them learn the new measuring stick.
• Mark the new normal kindly, not regretfully. When the route changes from a half hour to ten minutes, the ten minutes is now the walk. Talking about it as “all we can do now” is heavier than talking about it as “today’s walk.”
• Let some days be smaller than others. Even with reduced expectations, there will be days that fall under the new bar. Treating those days as failures undoes the work. Treating them as rest is closer to the truth.
• Apply this to yourself too. The caregiver’s “good day” also has to keep moving. A good day for a caregiver in the third year of this is not the same as a good day for a caregiver in the third week. Updating your own measuring stick is part of the same practice.

This is harder than it sounds. There is a quiet grief in lowering the bar, because each new bar is a quiet acknowledgment that the previous one is gone. Many of us have noticed that we resist the move for our loved one in the same way they resist it for themselves. Of course we do. It hurts.

What helps is naming, gently and together, that the goal is not to do what we used to do. The goal is to live well inside the day we are actually in. Some days that means ten minutes of slow walking and calling it complete. Some days it means staying in pajamas and being present with each other anyway. Some days it means nothing measurable happened, and nothing measurable needed to.

If today was small, today still counted.