Apologies but this is long!
Caring for another, sometimes for years, and then they die .... Should I mention this? ... well ... here is a thing that is never mentioned - carer guilt .... so common ... how we felt inadaquate, how guilty we felt when we were short, sharp, irritable, took a little time off .... the truth is, no matter if there is good love there, being a carer is hard, so hard - hard because there is no one else to share the experience with, hard because everyone else thinks that we are angels, hard because we are humans and faulty and frail and fail, even though we try our best ..... so I want, on this thread, to talk about the carers ... if you do feel guilt because you think that you weren't good enough (though you were you know, you stayed!) .... the truth is, you are wrong because you were .. you were the last person standing, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year ... still there, faults, true .. but still there ... so I wanted to mention this .... nearly everyone who has been a carer until death feels a guilt that they do not speak about, that no one speaks about .... but it is ok ... you did your best as a human .. and in the end, it was always about love ... so go on Camino, all of you ... re-live, love, affirm, light candles for that person now gone - but more importantly, forgive yourself, be human, cry, of course, but laugh, love, be ... what you did is recorded in heaven...
Why do I write this? Because all good and caring people have the same thing in common, they do critical introspection and never think that they were good enough, they always look at their faults ... bad people? they think that they are good so never question, they always think they are doing the right thing.
I looked after mother for some years - until she finally fell upwards out of her broken body and into the arms of waiting and welcoming angels - now, we didn't actually like each other at all and she was not an 'easy' person .. so much so that I ran away from home first when I was three and a half! ... we hadn't spoken for years ... then the need came up and as all others walked away I stood - last man standing, what else can you do?. The first two years I found it really hard, really hard, but then I found that I surrendered and everything in the past was somehow healed ... and I now bless the gift of those last years of her life ... at the funeral my son, who although a writer has to be the least religious person I thought I knew (wrongly I now see), wrote and spoke this - about a carer's love unrecognised by the carer... I have put it below .. so if you happen to be a carer who actually did their best but for some reason feels guilty, please read it, with my love.
From my beloved Son, Joshua James, at mother's funeral
"Death & Love
or — The Relationship Between Mother & Son, and how in love we live forever
Death is, in many ways, a celebration of life. It is the bookend that curtails our time on this mortal plane, but it is by no means a door closed that we may never look beyond. This short period now is an intermission of sorts, during which the lights come up and we look around and we blink, and we talk openly about that which came before and that which may follow.
It is a moment of contemplation and of reflection and also of rejoicing and of jubilation. It is not a moment of outright sadness, just as surely as it is neither a true beginning nor end.
When we see someone take death upon themselves, it is our chance to look at everything they were, as if for now, at least, their decisions are made and their actions are set in stone. And most importantly, what death is is a time to take stock of the one thing that transcends what we think of as time and place, and that thing is Love — the substance in which we all swim — though oftentimes we realise not that we do, for it is as intangible and profound as the dark matter that holds our stars in sway.
It is also as elusive, and equally as perplexing to define, and we convince ourselves that it evades our desperate groping for it, when we so often search with a singular purpose.
We write of love in the pages of whimsy as if it were the just reward only for those who are true of heart — the noble and deserving among us. But this is not reality, for love belongs to all, and it is the recognition of love in the unlikely places of the everyday that ennobles every one of us, and to feel it we must first recognise it, and to inspire it in others we must first understand the way in which we transmit it from ourselves.
Death of a loved one reveals many things to us. Most importantly it reveals how we loved this person, and how they loved us in return. Love in this way is traceable, as when the lights are up and our sight is cleared, that we may look both forward and backward with truth and with clarity, it is evident through our past actions how and when we loved and to what degree, and how we were loved in return.
Sometimes at this juncture we realise that what we took not for love, and perhaps passed off as mere routine and diligent caring, was in fact love in its truest and it’s deepest form.
These oversights and blithe disregards are easy to make when the trappings of life bully our common sense, but in death we cannot let ourselves for a moment confuse what love for a person really is — it is a commitment to their welfare, even when it means a disregard for one’s own, and it is being present when an awareness of one's presence may in fact be absent, and it is pushing oneself to be the best that one can be, for this person, in ways that one has to feel out and painstakingly discover along the way.
After all this, the feeling of love one receives is merely what echoes back when we throw our entirety into the painful void that is giving.
Some say that love takes a lifetime to build. I don’t know that this is true, but what I do believe is that at the end of a lifetime it is possible to understand love, or at least what the unique love meant between two people. Everything that was love reveals itself, just as everything that shrouded its clarity and purpose drops away. In this moment we can be sure in our heart that love existed and it existed well.
Some also say that when we die we die alone, and that we take nothing of ourselves with us when we depart. I, however, know this not to be true, for if in death love only becomes stronger for those who remain, how can it be that such a tie is broken for those who depart?
If it remains here, then it also remains there, and in this way it is everlasting and it is true and there is no mistaking that it existed and that it will always exist for the people who knew it."
To all carers, present and past, I wish you a Buen Camino and send you my love xxxx
))))
