Guilt

 

While caring for Marty, my wife,  I would occasionally make a quick trip to Dallas to see number one Grandson play soccer or go to some family member’s birthday party or something that was just an up there and back kind of trip.  There were times it just wasn’t practical to take Marty. Sometimes you have to simplify.

I always felt a little guilty and a little bit lazy when I did that, but I mostly thought it was best.

One time I was taking some furniture from our house to our daughter in Dallas. Marty and I were having dinner and I asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes.  I then talked about trying to get all that stuff in the van and how tight it would be.  Marty looked at me and said, “Do you have room for me?” 

Every now and then she would ask a question like that and it was a knife to my heart.  Of course, I would always make room for Marty. That was my job, to make a place, make a spot for her.  My job was to structure our life so Marty could survive and find some joy and normalcy in a very unnormal circumstance.

Sometimes to survive you must simplify, you must find the bare essentials and strip life down to the bone.  That’s what we did to cope with Marty’s stroke, that’s where I took us, thinking, believing we needed to focus inward to survive.

With Marty, when we came home from the hospitals and rehab it was all about survival, hers and mine. Simply staying alive and mentally stable took all our energy and efforts and even then we sometimes came up short.

 Recovery from a stroke takes a tremendous amount of energy and focus.  Everything is hard and exhausting.  Thinking, talking, eating, and breathing; those basic living skills all required enormous amounts of concentration, calories, and focus.  The extras in life like relationships, work and play were shoved to the back of the closet until we could move out of survival mode.  (See Maslow’s hierarchy of needs….we start with survival)

Of course, there are problems with this whole stripping down thing.  You really get tired of looking at yourself so bare, so uncovered.  You begin to see way too many of your own flaws.  You end up pushing too much in the closet, you get too internal and too focused on just living and you forget that the world outside your sphere still exists and still matters. 

You know, or you think the stripping down is temporary and necessary, but it soon becomes an integral part of your life that seems permanent.  You know in the back of your brain that sooner or later you must start adding elements of life back in and that can be more than a little scary.

And that’s just yourself.  Bringing your cared for, the one you have stripped down for, up to speed added a real level of complexity and difficulty.  I always wanted Marty to be part of life, I wanted her to be able to re-engage and enjoy the fruits of life, but the truth was, on so many levels, she simply couldn’t.  She didn’t have the physical, mental or emotional bandwidth to do it and I found myself, too often, leaving her sitting at home watching as I started to put my toes back in the waters of life.

I felt horribly guilty.

After she asked about having room for her I told her I would always have room for her, I would leave stuff on the side of the road to make room for her, I hated that she even asked the question, “Do you have room for me?” 

It’s one of those care giving issues.  It is an issue of caring for yourself and making sure that the cared for are present, are literally cared for, are noticed and are part of the flow of life.

That’s not always easy, in fact, it is very rarely easy, but nobody said it would be.  They did say it would be worth it, for once they (whoever that is) were right.