My father died. His wife lives with me now.
Not “his wife still has dementia” — that framing makes it sound like a temporary situation waiting for resolution. She lives with me. In my space. Requiring daily care. The routine of her needs continues on the same schedule it did when my father was alive, indifferent to the fact that I am also grieving.
Grief doesn’t wait for convenient timing. You don’t get to fully process one loss before the next demand arrives. There is no pause button. Someone needs their medication, needs to be redirected from the phone scammer who called, needs to be accompanied to a doctor’s appointment, needs the same question answered for the fourteenth time today — and all of this is happening in the same days that I am also trying to grieve my father, which is itself complicated because he was complicated.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” In the worst moments of this period, that teaching felt both true and completely inaccessible. The present moment was filled with grief and dementia care and the specific loneliness of a life that had become entirely organized around managing other people’s needs. The presence required to actually be in that moment — rather than dissociating from it, or using busyness to avoid it — was the practice.
AARP documents that 24% of caregivers report feeling isolated. That isolation is textured differently when it occurs inside grief — you are not just invisible as a caregiver, you are also invisible as a grieving person, because the caregiving function doesn’t pause to acknowledge that you are also losing something.
Judy lives with me now. My father is dead. Those two facts coexist, messy and ongoing and real. That is not a beautiful grief story. It’s just the truth of this particular life right now.
