Broken Limbs Falling Down
(I see them everywhere—all kinds of limbs in everyone’s yards.)
We pass each other discreetly on our regular morning walks. She is a current caregiver. I am a former one.
From what I know of the quality of life she has created with great perseverance for her husband who has Parkinson’s disease, she is a far better caregiver than I. It took me a long time to figure out that I had to become the authority person in our household, and my neighbor assumed that responsibility faster and became a more effective caregiver sooner.
There is another difference between us, however, and it is not just the different diseases our patients had—my daddy had Al and her husband has Parkinson’s—I was a daughter, and she is a wife. It takes a child longer to realize that she must take hold of the authoritative, decision-making position for a parent who can still create moments of lucidity and command attention in the midst of a disease that eventually destroys the illusion irrevocably that he has good sense. My daddy would have called his condition as: having no walking around sense.
Increasingly, I think our ability to connect logical dots out loud for others varies in terms of illusion. We must have a common ground of connecting the dots called reality, but I also think that we are, as a group of people, not nearly as competent—consistently and impeccably reasonable-- or free of the symptoms of dissembling that we relegate to dementia, whether it’s called of the Alzheimer’s variety or not.
But what committed caregivers do all share—whatever their familial or authoritative relationship to a parent—is something my friend said yesterday, “Heartbreak. I wake up to heartbreak every day.”
Heartbreak is a daily companion for caregivers who watch their patients lose mobility and communication skills. Their flesh fails in all kinds of ways. Minds wander and don’t come home.
Lurking on the periphery of what we observe are our dreams and images of the ideal life we had planned to live out happily ever after, for all of us have our reservoir of images and fairy tales that supposedly foretold the direction our lives would take. Disease, entrapment and chronic heartbreak were not part of the envisioned story.
Heartbreak is a major part of the story of an adult’s life for you need only live long and love someone to acknowledge the presence of the human condition we refer to with a word that does not do justice to the amount of pain and loss that word heartbreak points to in people.
Heartbreak caused by the imminent death of someone you love who has suffered is a special kind of heartbreak.
This current caregiver and I stop to discuss heartbreak. We do this in flat tones, eyes connecting fearlessly—no tears brimming. The conversation doesn’t last long. When it is time to move on, I tell her that her complexion is beautiful—it is—and that if she needs me I am just around the corner. She has never called me.
She assures me that my presence is meaningful and helpful and I nod, for that response is the polite answer of a veteran caregiver who knows that she has her own share of heartbreak to live with and figure out what to do with after the event reaches a different time in her life. She refers to her husband’s inevitable passing as “when it is over” but heartbreak won’t stop being over. The features of the heartbreak and loss will simply evolve.
She continues in her direction, which is opposite from mine, and I walk on, aware a-fresh of the clear sky, the flowers in my neighbors’ yards, the rampant squirrel population, the encroaching heat, the growing awareness of very dry ground which is signaling the approach of a drought because we have not had a enough rain. Trees are dying. On every street I see broken limbs hanging from parched trees. These broken limbs are just out of reach and will fall with a wind.
Sometimes a limb has fallen to the ground during the night. When I see it, if it is the day that the clean-up trucks collect them in the neighborhood, I go into my neighbor’s yard and drag the fallen limb to the street so it will get picked up and taken away. (I like to imagine that my neighbors do not even know a limb has fallen—were never dismayed or bothered.) See there? I say, brushing off the bark from my hands. Job done. Done by someone who doesn’t mind cleaning up the broken limbs that keep falling down--falling down.
No one has ever come out of the house to stop me. I have wondered at my own impulse to clean up my neighbors’ yards when the broken limb has fallen. Time after time I have done it without permission because the limb was broken and it fell and there it landed where I can see it and it doesn’t matter, it seems to me, whose job it is—it is a job that needs to be done and the sooner it is accomplished the sooner we can all get on with the job of living with heartbreak and clear skies and faint breezes and a heat that is often a harsh heat but still a reminder that for a while we are together in whatever state of health we have while living in a special place--the land of the living though in the company of broken limbs falling down all over the place.
I have no gardening impulse to justify my impulse toward yard work—toward confronting the broken branches in others’ yards. I have only the experience of having been and still am from time-to-time a caregiver who has learned to live inside a house where a limb was broken and took a long time to fall, and I was there and took care of the problem. Now, when I see a broken limb lying on the ground in any one’s yard I retrieve it and carry it to where it needs to go.
And, as a graduate of the school of Al where I confirmed what I had always suspected-- that cause and effect does not always have a reliable relationship-- it encourages me to know that when I do this, I always, always feel better.