The Reluctant Carer - The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches from the Edge of Life

The Reluctant Carer is a writer and teacher and lives in South East England.

I forget who rang, but I remember the call.

No one was certain which of my fathers ailments had jumped the queue, but there were plenty of contenders. Heart, kidneys, or those beleaguered, low-tar lungs? The smart money would be on something respiratory, but we were deep in extra time already. Any smart money fled long ago.

These calls come, sooner or later. Wherever you are in your journey, as they say. The collapse of a loved one, or someone you are supposed to love, will abduct you into another reality.

The question is how readily we sign up for the ride.

As my mother or my sister or my brother outlined the details of the Old Mans latest hospital admission, I paced the upstairs of my home. This was where we took important calls because the signal was clear.

Let me figure out what to do, I said. Then I hung up the phone.

The knot in my stomach was already forming the opinion that I didnt want to go back. Back to the house where my parents lived and I was mostly raised, now seventy miles from my own.

I had left them just the day before. Dad was eighty-six then. Mum, eighty-eight, fitter than my father, but fragile all the same. There was always something that needed doing and it was good just to be around. Even if all each visit did was make it easier to leave again, it was better than nothing. Besides, I liked being there. Up to a point. It still resembled childhood, somehow. Much older actors, but essentially the same play. And at that point still one I could walk out of.

They were in their forties when they had me, twelve years after my sister and nine since my brother. On holidays, the other kids sometimes thought my parents were my grandparents. This worried me, but I was worried already. Mentally preparing for their deaths and all deaths since I realized mortality was the price of being around. I was seven years old, in the same room where I am writing this now, reading a storybook about birds, when it hit me. One bird died and the other birds could neither revive it nor accept its passing. I ran downstairs in a panic and asked my mother if we would both die.

Yes, she told me. But not for a very long time.

Right on both counts.

It is the answered prayers that we have to watch out for, and their long lives were mine.

Dad spent four decades in the merchant navy and I watched his fettle turn for the worse in recent years as slowly and surely as one of his ships. The nature of his work meant I didnt see much of him growing up. By the time he retired I had left home. Yet in each of these more frequent crises, by some eerie symmetry, I was with him. As if we had been sailing back towards each other all along. Or rather he lay in wait, floating. Just beneath the surface... like a mine.

This call was different. I could sense it, and I knew because I didnt want to know. Despite decades of planning, fretting and elaborate internal bargaining, I felt no more qualified to take this on board at forty-seven than at seven.

I went downstairs to tell my wife.

Dads in hospital again. I dont know what difference it makes if Im there. I just got back. Maybe I can wait and see what happens...

Having crossed the Atlantic countless times to nurse her mother through a quarter-century of cancer, she turned from her cooking and said simply

Go.

My brother was nearby and picked me up. Ninety minutes later we arrived.

We moved into this house in 1976, that fabled summer of parched verges and punk rock. I daresay the five tall, smooth-tiled steps up to the front door seemed, like cigarettes and unprotected sex, to be a good idea at the time.

They have been cracked by the subsequent seasons, acquired a grab rail and attain, in rain or winter, the kind of dreadful status in the minds of those who dwell atop them as K2 and the Eiger hold for mountaineers.

No one old or sober has yet fallen all the way down them, but as I hauled my bag indoors that day I was falling up them, in a sense. Out of one life and into another. A mile away, in hospital, Dad was on the margins, but it was my world that was really changing. Having pitched his tent at deaths door long before it opened, like an anxious early drinker, or a shopper waiting on the sale, he was braced for what was coming. I was in for a surprise.

*

In those nine months Dad managed a partial rebound which allowed him and his rolling buffet of comorbidities home, and, shortly after, I abandoned mine. My marriage, like my father, was less stable than it seemed and my wife and I are in the foothills of divorce. Irreversibly so.

In what turned out to be a synchronous skip fire of a season, my work evaporated at the same time as one grand self-employed gamble went gratuitously wrong, and it will take years to get back to that point again, if I ever do. So my somehow-recovering father was tended to by a quietly collapsing version of his son. Ready at your bedside, bedraggled with errors, out of money, as well as love, luck and lodging. As the year trudged on I found myself subtly and circumstantially absorbed into my parents house and rituals, the gaps between what they can, cant and shouldnt do.

Gradually, I become a carer. My siblings have kids and karma of their own. They work. I have no children, job, money or anyone else to worry about now. This is how I came to be back in the town and the bedroom I left in the late eighties, caring for people in their late eighties. Sure, I care. But I am also captive. And care sounds better than failure. All I really have is nowhere else to go.

Dont care was made to care! my mother used to say to me, an admonishment fashioned from an old rhyme. And so it came to pass.

Dont care didnt care,

Dont care was wild:

Dont carestole plum and pear

Like any beggars child.

Dont care was made to care,

Dont care washung:

Dont care was put in a pot

And boiled till he was done.

People ask me what I want: friends, lawyers, bartenders. I have no idea. Some days a time machine, others a gun. Most mornings I dont even ask myself. The first question in this house is always, Did we make it through the night?

Once a rustle, a cough or a groan confirms our group survival then the big issue dissolves into the everyday details and desires of any other household can I make it to the bathroom before you?

Dads ablutions unfold at a subglacial rate which means I do not want to miss my slot before he gets in there and stays put for the duration of the average movie. That he gets to the bathroom at all is a wonderful thing. It wasnt always so and is by no means certain. But I still dont want to get stuck behind him. If nothing else, being back at home has proven a radical affirmation that you can be grateful and selfish at the same time.

Joint first on the everyday wish list is that my mother eighty-nine now, and presently felled by shingles doesnt make it downstairs before me and start doing things for herself when she is this unwell. She has a determination which, through infirmity, borders on self-destruction, and will, like some crazed Olympian, attempt everything she can unless someone intervenes.

Despite the considerable edge in years and mobility, my winning this slow-paced race is not a given. I dont want to get up and face things, and I wont until I hear one of them stirring. Only then will I burst forth belatedly and either get into the bathroom first (which annoys Dad) or intercept Mum (which startles and confuses her). I had hoped the adolescent stasis of lying in bed and wrangling negative outcomes would have fallen away in middle age, but not yet. If anything, its back with a vengeance, like me, in the same bed where it began. A truly wise person once told me that people dont change, they just become more of who they are. I see little in this house to refute that.