Eight days after I posted my last entry here, my father died. So... life changed, as it does when a parent dies, and I have since been trying to become familiar with the geography of this new landscape.
For ten years I was my dad's carer - though for only five and a half years of that did I actually care for him in his own home. But throughout the last decade he has been my central focus, my sole responsibility, and looking after him has been (any carer would identify with this) both tremendously difficult, and very rewarding. But being a carer is a tough call, and it comes without a handbook. You learn by doing, and you hope that your learning doesn't come at your loved-one's expense - but inevitably it does. This is where the guilt lingers, afterwards. All the things you got wrong: because of inexperience, because of self-protectiveness, because of exhaustion and depression, and sometimes because the system seemed to be stacked against you.
I really thought that, once it was all over, I would feel liberated and be able to return to the self I'd once been. Being a carer grinds you down - eroding your sense of self like nothing else, whilst replacing it with something initially unwelcome yet ultimately valuable. I wrongly imagined that this 'carer self' was a temporary me, one I could shed after my father had died (and he was in his nineties, so there was always the sense that this end might come at any time). But of course what happens is that any fundamental experience changes you forever. I was a self-reliant, self-serving, artist long before I became a carer. Now, like nested Russian dolls, my innermost core is still the painter, but accumulations since have added matronly layers of responsibility and compassion. I don't feel liberated; I feel as if I've been made redundant from a job which took many years to learn. As an ex-carer I feel, too, as if I've lost a social identity - one which many people seemed to find more acceptable than my identity as an artist.
In time I may sense that the whole experience has added to my sense of self; not stolen, as I feel at the moment, ten years of my life and turned me into something I never wished to be. That pessimistic reckoning is because grief is still uppermost. Grief which swoops like a predatory bird, out of nowhere. Grief which breaks like a huge devouring wave: all the cliches are true. But grief has its own rhythms, and it's becoming apparent to me that this time is, in its own way, a process of labour: of giving birth to whatever - whoever - comes next.
Meanwhile I find it hard to reassess myself as being out of the loop: not needed any longer; not consulted - for as a carer, you are not only where the buck stops, you are what the buck crashes into: the buffers at the end of the line. I was the advocate for my father; his nurse; his housekeeper; his cook; his provider; his financial organiser; his ally - and only, right at the very end of the list, his daughter. From the moment I stepped into the breach and tried to take the weight of his life on my shoulders, I ceased to be his child in all but name.
A very old and ill parent becomes the child; this is so much a truism it hardly bears repeating. What is not mentioned is that a child-parent relationship which becomes a carer-parent relationship is as hard for the parent as it is for the carer. Though it may seem the carer gives up so much - freedom of movement, freedom of choice, even the freedom not to care - this is always against a background of the many more profound losses experienced by the parent, losses which bite at every level: physical, social, intellectual, emotional. This, much more than the physical drudgery, is what makes caring for an elderly parent so grindingly difficult and heartbreaking. If one takes on the job out of love, it is love which suffers and is, in the end, either transformed or ground away to nothing.
But even now, long before I am ready to bring the whole picture into focus, I know that being a carer added a dimension to me which was missing. As simple as it sounds, it taught me to care... I observe with the painful clarity of hindsight how careless I was; how easily I shucked off responsibility; how little I knew of real suffering. But unless we find out by doing, we learn nothing of our limits when it comes to looking after those who are helpless and desperate. I truly never wanted to go there but I did go there, in good heart, and only kicking and struggling a little. From the fog of its aftermath, I would like to tell all those other carers trying to survive their own difficult undertaking, this one thing: refuse to let love be the casualty of caring. Getting that one thing right matters more than anything else. And if you hold onto the love, eventually it will be that love which remains behind to mend you and give you solace.
