We Can't Ever Win

We tried to make light of it, the way we sometimes do with the heaviest things. It came out almost as a joke: we can’t ever win. But nobody in the room was really laughing, because everyone recognized exactly what it meant.

We think through every scenario. We give up our own joy, our own plans, our own place in an experience, so that our care recipient can have theirs, and often so that the people around them, their family of origin, their old friends, their own children, can have a smoother version of it too, ahead of our own needs, most of the time without being asked to. We want it to be good because some part of us is afraid it will be the last one. And we do not know how to make something good and memorable for someone whose memory is failing, while carrying the fear that the one detail that goes wrong will be the detail everyone remembers. Not the years of care. The one dropped thing.

We often know, before we even step onto the field, that there is no way to win this particular game. So we put on the armor anyway. We tell ourselves it will protect us. And then the comments come, small ones, offhand ones, and we let them in anyway, and we hear them in the worst possible light, because some part of us has already decided that the people making them assume the worst of us. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. It rarely matters which, by the time the armor has done its work of making us brace instead of rest.

This costs something. It is exhausting in a way that does not show up on any list of caregiving tasks, because it is not a task. It is a constant, low-grade vigilance against a verdict that may never even be spoken aloud. And it takes time and energy that would otherwise go toward the actual person in front of us, the one we are doing all of this for in the first place.

We are not going to pretend there is a way around this one. It is not a problem to be solved this week, or maybe ever. It is simply true, and it is heavy, and several people in this room are carrying it right now. We wanted to say that plainly, without rushing past it: this is one of the hardest parts of this work, and it deserves to be named exactly as hard as it is.