For
the past several months, I’ve watched as several women I know join a
sorority none of us would have ever voluntarily joined yet actively
serve in every day. It’s a sorority of women that have, for whatever
reason, become caregivers of our husbands. Day in and day out, we live
our vows of “in sickness and in health” to the letter, taking on the
physical load and emotional toll of making sure
our husbands get through the daily battle of whatever illness has
landed on them. I promise you, none of us asked for this, but it is a
role I have come to love, even on the most difficult of days when all
you want to do is yell, “I can’t do this anymore, you either find a way
to deal with this or I’m going to curl up in a corner, go to sleep, and
fight waking up ever again.” It’s HARD. We are on the front lines of
seeing the man we love, the man we married that stood strong and proud
at the altar, the man that was once the “hunter/gatherer” for the
family, struggle to do even the simplest, most mundane of tasks, from
going to the bathroom to putting on a pair of shorts, to combing his
hair, to drying off after a shower, walking through the house, eating a
meal, or even completing a thought.
This journey of mine has
brought me face-to-face with my own mother’s journey from wife to
caregiver of my father. For all intents and purposes, theirs was a
marriage of agreement and arrangement. Two nattering old women decided
that their kids would be perfectly suited for one another. My father,
the sweetest, nicest man I’ve ever known, who wouldn’t say shit if he
had a mouth full of it, came home from the Navy to meet my mother at a
dinner the two women arranged. My mother came from an unconventional
family background, her father having been around 35 years older than her
mother, died when my mother was two, nearly three. Her mother raised
her as a widow until she met and married the town drunk and then it was
on. Her life was in constant upheaval and her mother eventually
divorced the drunk, but not before wreaking havoc in the lives of
everyone in the family and leaving three women, my grandma and her now
two daughters, my mom and her half-sister, to fend for themselves. My
mother became a dental assistant and on payday, her mother would stand
at the door with her hand outstretched and my mother had to hand over
her paycheck to her. When this dinner was arranged, my mother not only
saw handsome sailor at the table across from her, she saw her knight in
shining armor. She put him on a white steed and never allowed him to
dismount that steed. She worshipped the ground he walked on.
In June 1995, he woke up one morning, having endured a week of
agonizing headaches, and collapsed on the bed, suffering from a brain
aneurysm. He was whisked off to the hospital and then to another one,
where he was rushed into surgery by an amazing neurosurgeon. During
surgery, the main artery in his brain ruptured, causing two strokes in
the front lobe of the brain, otherwise known as the “executive lobe”,
where all decisions and impetus for doing anything come from. My sweet
dad went from a Type A “gotta get it done yesterday!” to falling asleep
in front of the television while watching endless hours of TV Land and
Cartoon Network. Upon arriving at the hospital the day of his aneurysm,
I said a simple prayer. I asked God, if you’re going to take my dad
Home, please give us the strength to go on with a life that would make
him proud. If you’re going to leave him with us, please give us the
strength to give him a life of peace, comfort, and pride.
My
mother, on the other hand, became a tightly wound ball of nerves, white
knuckling away hours in the waiting room, shredding tissues, working
herself into a hysterical mess of tears and nerves. My dad survived and
had a shunt put in eventually to rid his brain of the fluid,
encephalitis, but he was forever changed. As one doctor put it, “Your
father has had the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. His ‘get up and
go’ was taken away when he had those two strokes.” In other words, my
dad would always have the mentality of an 11 year old boy. He was
incapable of summoning the initiative it took to do anything around the
house. My uncle kept him on at the shutter shop he owned and kept my
dad employed until it became very apparent in 2006 that my father was
struggling with the simplest of tasks related to a move to a new and
larger building. He couldn’t find his way around, couldn’t remember
simple tasks. My uncle was torn at having to make the decision to let
my dad go, and he tearfully apologized to me, but he had a business to
run and he had the safety of not only my father to consider, but every
other employee as well. I completely understood and made sure he knew
that. My mother DIDN’T want to understand and made sure he knew that as
well. Theirs has been a contentious relationship for the past almost
40 years and she’s not been kind to my father’s family. This was the
nail in the familial coffin.
Two years after my father’s
brain aneurysm, my mother noticed a lump on her neck. The doctor put
her on antibiotics and the lump went away, only to reappear that
November. She went to an ENT who ran tests and in his office, explained
she had mucoepidermoid carcinoma. She had a tumor on her right saliva
gland, a very aggressive form of cancer, and surgery was needed
immediately. As if that wasn’t shock enough, what the doctor said next
blew her mind:
“Mary, this form of cancer doesn’t just show up.
It is a cancer that is kicked into gear by a traumatic event. You’ve
told me about your husband’s brain aneurysm and how the stress affected
you. I’d venture to say that it was that incident that set this all
into motion.”
In other words, my mother stressed herself into
cancer. Or as she liked to put it to other people, not jokingly, “My
husband caused my cancer.” She thought that was comical. She had a
very invasive surgery that removed nearly all of the right side of her
neck, chemo wouldn’t touch this cancer but she underwent radiation five
days a week for six weeks and is now 17 years cancer-free.
The
next several years as my father required more and more care, my mother’s
handwringing became worse and worse, her worrying became almost
uncontrollable, and we began hearing a mantra in all of her
conversations. “He doesn’t do ________ (insert anything there
pertaining to work around the house) anymore.” And then…….
“HE’S NOT THE MAN THAT I MARRIED!”
I heard those last words over and over and over during the course of
the next several years. Finally it occurred to me what was going on.
My father, her knight in shining armor on his trusty white steed, dared
to fall off that horse and was never able to get back on. For the
longest time she’d placed him so high on a pedestal that when he fell
off, her world crumbled. She’d never had to really be a “giver” in the
marriage. He was always there to take care of her and anything that
came along. One day, in one fell swoop, her man ended up needing help
and she had no clue as to how to take care of him. She was still in “I
want my husband back. He’s not the man I married!” territory. She was
eyeball deep in that fantasy and refused to see that everyone changes.
Even that man she married that she absolutely worshiped and adored, had
changed over the years in great ways, but in her mind she still saw her
sailor that swept into her life, rescuing her from that awful life with
her mother.
One day, not long after Mike and I married, while
we were staying with my parents until he found a job, my mother went
into one of her hand-wringing “he’s not the man that I married!” fits
when Mike had had enough.
“Mary, knock it off. You have two options
here. One, you can go out there and sit with your husband and thank
God Almighty that he survived a horrific aneurysm and strokes and even
if it’s just keeping him company while he falls asleep to Cartoon
Network, you have a husband that is ALIVE and so what if you have to
take care of him and his needs—he’s alive. That’s choice one. Or, two,
you could be going out to the cemetery to where Ed and Nadine are
buried (my paternal grandparents) and visit your husband while he’s
pushing up daisies. So he’s not the man you married. YOU’RE not the
woman he married either. Everyone changes. NO ONE stays the same once
they’re married. People change, lives change. You’re stuck in November
1963 at the altar where he rescued you. Now, grow up and go be the
wife he needs and not the whining shrew he’s now able to tune out
because he has the brain of an 11 year old boy.”
That’s my
husband. Cutting right through the bullshit to the real truth. And she
didn’t like it one teeny bit. But it was all true.
The night
that I sat in the waiting room waiting to hear if my husband was going
to live or die, I made a promise to God and myself. I would NOT become
my mother. If this was the life that had been planned for us all along,
then I would live that life to the best of my ability. I’d live a life
that would honor my husband. Most of all, I would live a life that
would NOT resemble the life my mother lived, one of fear, one of nagging
and controlling.
I can only speak for myself, but I can
honestly say my husband is not the same man I married. Happily. The
man I found in 2001 was angry. He was resentful of women in his past.
Quick to be angry, slow to think before he spoke. Of course, being a
woman, my first thought was, “I love him—I’ll change him!” I can’t
remember how I found the book but one day I managed to get my hands on
The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Omartian, a book that changed my
entire life.
Surprise--my husband wasn’t the problem. I was.
Reading the book I learned to change MYSELF from within, I learned to
quit standing in God’s way—how else could he do his work if I was
standing in between he and Mike? I learned to PRAY for my husband.
Then one day, I asked God to do something that is very, very powerful. I
asked Him to show me Mike through His eyes. What I saw amazed me. I
saw a grown man with the heart of a little boy. I saw a man that made
his own life by working hard, telling himself his abusive childhood
didn’t matter, that wanted desperately to be loved and love someone
completely and wholly in return. I saw a man that was willing to change
many things about him for the right woman and I saw that I was that
woman, but I had to exhibit the qualities of a woman he would trust with
what he was willing to change. Becoming a caregiver to your husband is
an act of complete submission to the Lord so you are able to exhibit
His goodness and kindness to your husband and those watching. As He
submitted to the humility of washing the feet of the disciples, we
submit to His will and metaphorically, and sometimes not to
metaphorically, wash the feet of our husband.
Lately, several
women I’ve either known for years, or have come to know through
Facebook, or other forums on the net, have stood at the same door I
stood at two years ago. They’ve stood at the door that, once they
walked through, would lead them into a life where they’d see their
spouse, their husband, the love of their life, suffer through accidents
and illnesses. Some were minor, several were very serious. These
women, one by one, have become caregivers to the person they loved the
most after God Himself. Together, in this sorority, we have slipped
hospital gowns on our husbands, we have walked them down a hospital
hall, rolling IV towers alongside us. We’ve waited in hospital waiting
rooms with total strangers, longing anxiously to see the familiar face
of a surgeon and hoping to hear only the best news, but many times
digesting the worst. We’ve sterilized the house to welcome home our
sick spouse, held their heads while they vomited, pull them off the
toilet, clean them up after they’ve used the toilet, held a urinal while
they leaned on us for support. We have administered medicine, changed
bandages, and arranged follow-up doctor appointments. Some of us have
taken stitches out at home, wrapped wounds, washed blood spattered
clothes and bed sheets. We have held their hands while they cried, and
held our own heads while we cried, silently in the bathroom with the
shower running to drown out the sound of sobs. We have crunched numbers
and asked how we would make it, and some of us have looked up to the
heavens to offer thanks for the gift card or check that arrived in the
mail totally and completely unexpectedly. We wake up living our vows,
we move through the day living our vows, and we go to bed living our
vows. This is a role we take seriously, that of a caregiver. Our loved
ones didn’t ask to be sick and truth be told, we would take their
illness in a nanosecond to take the pain and fear away from them. Women
are MUCH stronger than people think and I have discovered that men
aren’t as strong as they like to let on. If your spouse becomes sick
and you must assume the role of caregiver, please don’t look at it as a
burden. It is a joy to show your love for your spouse when he or she
runs headlong into illness. It is exhausting, frustrating, expensive,
painful, confusing, and maddening, but it also a JOY. In the words of
Jesus, "The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one
of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'
Matthew 25:40.
I will never know His true reasons for my
father’s aneurysm, or why it happened, but watching all of that unfold
was the blueprint I needed to see in order to avoid doing to my husband
what my mother did to hers. Our parents’ behavior many times influences
OUR behavior in situations. I was given the opportunity to right the
emotional ship I’d seen in my own family, and to serve my spouse with
dignity and love and not belittling him or whining about what was and
why couldn’t it also be again. My husband has been forever changed, but
then again, so have I.
To my sisters that have entered the
service of being a caregiver, you are in good company, for there are so
many more of you than you’re aware of. Your heart is filled to the
overflowing with love for a spouse that repeated the same vows to you
that you repeated to him. Your care is worth more than diamonds to the
one that loves you and depends on you. You’re tired, I know, but each
day begins with fresh new mercies. Your fears overwhelm you and drive
you to tears, but remember, "Come to me, all you who are weary and
burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28. You take time to
shed your tears after your loved one is put to bed and the tears bring
relief. Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning.
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