Intimacy Inside a Garden Wall: A Tribute to the Caregiver
The caregiver is a sure safety net. Caregivers brace our falls below the sight line. They experience fear, feebleness, and deprivation, but where do they go for support? They’re not the ones with cancer. They’re not the ones who tumbled.
Electric buzzing in my ears, pool-splashing next door, friendly conversing in the green belt beyond the yard, background noises of weed-whackers, freeway traffic, hummingbirds, and breezes fill the aural space around the back yard. My husband and I are engaged in ritual, liturgy, a sacred moment behind a garden wall set aside for us.
Errant wisps of hair, gray and brown, stage their unwelcome comeback between chemo treatments. Their intrusion mars my “FOX” look embroidered on the back of a cap my friend Tracey gave me. So, towel draped over my shoulders, I stand with eyes closed while my husband shaves my head clean with his rustic razor. He kisses my forehead.
Inside the garden wall, a quirky intimacy takes shape, decades of “for better or for worse,” give and take, love and respect, though honestly, the heavy lifting is more on Rick’s side. He is my protector, wall, and safe enclosure, watching, encircling, guarding me. Steadfast and dependable, he does not give or shift, and his love is fresh each morning. I’ve always loved the way Rick greets me every day. It’s more than being a morning person; he has a living love, bold, resilient, and undying.
Exposed like a gnarled oak in winter, I worry about exhausting him with my needs and complaints, but he is present and listens to droning lists of irritations. It’s one thing to say “I do”; it’s another thing to stay true. He stays true. Even after a long day of attending to clients—he’s a Clinical Psychologist—he still attends to me. He fills an invisible void. It saddens me to think that some spouses leave patients with cancer or that patients have to go through it alone for other reasons. How do they cope? How do they find their pluck?
A crisis can reveal complementary traits in a marriage; differences become less annoying, more beneficial. I have spatial awareness; Rick emotional awareness. He tunes into the feelings of people in the room. On the Enneagram he is a 2 with a 3 “wing,” primarily a helper with a need to achieve. The Enneagram is a well-known tool which points out the strengths and weaknesses of a trait. Type twos are empathetic, sincere, and warm, but they can slip into doing things for others to be needed. In a crisis, however, Rick’s type is like finding the right antibiotic for a stubborn illness. Well suited to his work of more than three decades, he is still energized by it. He expends his energy—an overabundance of it—day after day, month after month, year after year to benefit his clients. His work yields pine trees instead of thorn bushes, myrtles instead of briers for a vast, nameless—at least to me—network of individuals and families. I can only imagine the healing balm and release he proffers because he does that for me when I’m most vulnerable and brittle.
The caregiver is a sure safety net. Caregivers brace our falls below the sight line. They experience fear, feebleness, and deprivation, but where do they go for support? They’re not the ones with cancer. They’re not the ones who tumble. I love knowing that our kids ask their dad how it is for him as he keeps our family and friends informed of my setbacks and surgeries, as he ministers to my aching body and bruised spirit. They intuit the special challenge he faces. His friends know it too. They pour into the hospital to stand by him. Rick is like an unflappable switch board operator in the early days of telephone, efficiently plugging in the cables to answer an extensive network of calls. When the white-knuckle days in the hospital pass, he proudly displays the hospital texts he types into a story to remember the wild twists and turns.
If you wonder how to help a person with a life-disrupter, seek out the caregiver. Simply show up and be present. Ask how it’s going and be willing to listen without offering advice. Tune into the fatigue, the fear, the special burden of this role. In so doing you will help the patient more than you know.