One down, one to go.
That was the thought I had at my father’s death. Not a tender moment. Not the clean grief the situation seemed to demand. The ugly, honest, exhausted thought: dad died, but the journey continues with Judy. She lives with me. Dementia doesn’t stop because someone else died.
I say this not because I’m proud of the thought but because the alternative — performing grief that looks the way grief is supposed to look, clean and sad and focused on the person who died — would be less true. The caregiver’s grief happens in the middle of ongoing responsibility. It doesn’t get its own undivided time. You are sad and also: someone needs their medication, someone needs to be redirected, someone needs to be kept safe from the phone scammers who called this morning.
Surgeon General Murthy’s loneliness advisory documented the health consequences of this kind of ongoing isolation — the kind that doesn’t resolve when the primary crisis changes. I was one of the 24% of caregivers who report feeling isolated. That isolation is particular in its texture: surrounded by need, responsible for everything, invisible as a person inside the function of care.
Pema Chödrön teaches that genuine compassion begins with the willingness to be present with suffering rather than trying to fix it or make it more comfortable. Grief inside ongoing caregiving is suffering that cannot be fixed or resolved. The practice is simply being present with it — acknowledging it fully without requiring it to be simpler than it is.
One down, one to go. That’s not heartless. That’s the honest accounting of someone who is carrying real weight, telling the truth about it instead of performing something easier to receive.
Honest is what we need more of. Even when — especially when — it’s not pretty.
