Caring for Yourself While You Care

You have rearranged your life, your sleep, your work, maybe your marriage, around someone who is dying, and you are tired in a way that sleep does not fix. And under the tiredness there is something you do not say out loud, because it sounds monstrous: some part of you wants this to be over.

Resentment is not a verdict

Wanting it to be over does not mean you want them dead. It means you have a body with limits, and the body has been past its limits for a while. Resentment at the person you are caring for, at the siblings who are not helping, at the friends who stopped calling, at the illness, at yourself: all of this is what exhaustion sounds like when it finally speaks. It is not a moral fact about you. It is information about how tired you are.

The trouble is what we do with it. We feel the resentment, then we feel ashamed of it, then we work harder to prove the shame wrong, and the harder we work the more resentful we become. This wheel grinds people down, including people who are, by any measure, doing something heroic.

The way off the wheel is not to stop resenting. It is to stop being ashamed of it. When the thought comes, “I can’t do this anymore,” let it be a thought. Do not argue with it, do not obey it, do not punish yourself for it. Notice it, breathe out, and go on with the next small thing. A thought that is allowed to be a thought passes. A thought that is fought becomes a wall.

The body’s limits are not failures

Your body is one more thing in this situation that is not under your control. It gets tired, it gets sick, it needs to eat and sleep and move. When it fails, it is not letting you down. It is telling the truth about what a body is.

So eat. Sleep when you can, even badly. Walk around the block. Drink water. These are the maintenance of the one instrument you have for caring, and a caregiver who collapses helps no one.

Say yes when someone offers help, even imperfect help. Yes to the neighbor’s casserole, the cousin’s clumsy visit, the hospice volunteer you did not ask for. Accepting help is part of caring. The person you love does not need you to be the only one; they need the room to be calm and the care to be steady, and that takes more than one exhausted person.

Five minutes in the hallway

In the gaps, in the car, in the bathroom with the door locked, let your shoulders drop and rest for a few breaths in the pause at the end of each out-breath (the practice). Then stay where you are and let everything be as it is, the tiredness, the sadness, the resentment, the love, without sorting them. At the end, say silently, in your own words, “Whatever good there was in this, let it go to them,” and go back. Those minutes are the difference between a caregiver who can keep going and one who cannot.

You are allowed to have a life

There will be a day when this is over, and you will still be here. Whatever you have set down to do this, keep a thread to it. Call the friend. Read the ten pages. Keep one small thing that is only yours. The person you are caring for was, until recently, living a life too, and would not want theirs to cost you yours.