Today, I want to share my appreciation for caregivers after having read this beautiful post by Megan Failey who writes about her poet laureate partner Andrea Gibson who recently passed (Megan refers to Andrea with “they” pronouns).
In her post, Megan talks about the shift she’s gone through from being the caregiver to the receiver and the circular nature of this human currency. She starts by talking about how she cared for Andrea:
“Strange, how even love can feel like a small injury. To receive it when you are not strong enough to return it can be a nick, a paper cut, a bruise. I wasn’t a perfect caregiver. But even perfection would not have eased their ache. There was still the gravity of what went missing: the classes I stopped teaching, the book I stopped writing, the friends I drifted from, the family I rarely saw. For four years, my entire life reoriented around the desperate goal of keeping theirs going. Which was, in part, a selfish goal. They were my favorite hang, my belly-laugh, my compass and gentle shove toward goodness. My dreamboat. I wanted to keep them here forever.”
And, then after Andrea passed, Megan is astonished by how quickly she became the recipient of care from her friends:
“What stuns me daily, what brings me to my knees, is how vastly I have oscillated from caregiver to receiver. This doesn’t feel like a role reversal so much as proof: love circulates. We take turns. Offering, accepting. This is the choreography of care. The dance that never ends, only changes partners, changes who leads. In these last months, a team of people working to promote Come See Me in the Good Light has made sure my flights are covered. My cars. My hotels. My meals. Even some of my clothes. I used to hold every calendar date, medicine name, appointment time, and side effects in my mind. My brain was so many things at once: a calendar, a pharmacist, a nurse, a secretary, a hope chest. Now someone else tells me where to be and when. I just get in the car. And audiences around the world hold space for me to grieve in public.”
She continues,
“I have received what I gave, tenfold.
And I know this now:
Love is not a fixed role.
It moves.
It trades hands.”
For those of us who’ve been in a caregiving mode, including my two sisters who are giving such loving attention to our 88-year-old parents, the question looms, “Are we open to being cared for? How might we make the difficult yet magical shift from one role to another?” At some point, every caregiver becomes a receiver. That’s not failure—it’s being human.
-Chip