I See You, Caregiver

This is not a shoutout, but rather, a whisper of encouragement to anyone who has been caring for a loved one for a long time.

It is a message slipping into your hands from a bottle I cast into the sea near a shore for caregivers, those who don’t have time or energy to write an SOS in the sand.

This is the “Thinking of You” note you never expected as you mindfully (and likely unwittingly) sacrifice chunks of your life for a greater good: the well-being of someone whose life does not fit the norms of health or agency.

This is my nod to you across a crowded waiting room — an emergency room, treatment facility, perhaps even a police station or a courtroom — that I didn’t have the wherewithal to offer, and that you probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway, preoccupied as you were with your own caregiving concerns.

The cause that has joined you and yours, me and mine, and all of us together in our helper-helpee constellations, may be illness, injury, or aging. It may be hereditary and unsurprising, or mysteriously inexplicable. It might be something that grew slowly and surreptitiously, outside the radar of the standard checkup, until it was finally unmissable. Or it may have struck hard and fast.

It may be one of the invisible illnesses that manifest in thought or mood or mind’s eye, where help is found in places…