"Grace, belatedly..…Becoming the daughter she needed" By Sarah Bain

Spring Season Letters From ACaregiver

Hello, Dear Reader! Welcome to our new Carer Mentor community members!

I’m Victoria. I created Carer Mentor to offer heartfelt empathy for Caregivers. It’s a hub of practical tools, resources, and insights. A community support network for all of us human-ing hard. ❤️

You can read about why I started Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration here.

Two new essential articles:

1. I recommend using the quick-start navigation guide to explore the website.

2. Downloadable essentials, a FREE 🎁 for you, What You Need to Know Before an Unexpected Hospital Trip. So you can benefit from my numerous ER trips.

You’re not alone

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Letters from a Caregiver.

“Letters from a Caregiver” is a weekly article where a caregiver offers wisdom, compassion, and hope to their younger self. No one knows us as well as we know ourselves, and even then, we may second-guess ourselves. The choices, challenges and tragedies we’ve faced have forged us in more ways than anyone can understand; in ways we’re still trying to decipher!

There are two previous seasons of Twenty-One Letters.

This Spring Season so far

1. “Misunderstood, and everyone has an opinion,” By Victoria

2. “What It Takes To Embrace the Life He Has “ By Chris B. Writes

3. “The Long Road Home for a Different Kind of Future” By Haley Haddow

Today’s ‘Letter from a Caregiver’ is by Sarah Bain

Thank you, Sarah, for sharing your reflections so openly with us.

As Sarah and I prepared this piece for publication, we exchanged thoughts on how writing to our younger selves enables us to dig deeper into the motivations behind what drives/drove our caregiving. When we’re in the swirl of unpredictable caregiving, we can’t always see how past threads have been woven together to influence our choices.

“Writing this letter was more cathartic than I expected, and I really felt as if I tapped into a part of myself that still needed to be heard. I needed to offer myself more grace and be less hard on myself, and I think this letter has helped me do that.” - Sarah Bain

I recommend reading these other articles by Sarah:

• When dying happens ...Friday, August 2, 2024

• How I want to grieve ...with you by my side

• The dark side of grief...or how family members get in the way of grief

Author’s Bio: Sarah Bain is a writer and thanatology student living in Spokane, Washington with her dog, two cats, and husband. She walks four to seven miles a day, loves a good nap, and thinks often about normalizing conversations around death, dying, and grief. She is both an orphan and a mother of four — one who left too soon, and three who still walk this planet. You can follow her on Substack at A Container For My Thoughts and on Instagram, where she's still figuring out what she's actually writing about.

Grace, Belatedly…Becoming the daughter she needed

Dear past Sarah,

I remember the day and month so well. On January 7, 2024, the call came after 10:30 pm from your mother’s cell phone. Only it wasn’t your mother who was calling. It was her friend, and as soon as you heard her voice you knew right away that something was wrong. You’ve felt that before in the way that a person responds on the other end of the phone when you say hello—the way that the inflection of her voice makes you slide down against the wall and fall to the floor because something is so very wrong.

Sarah, it’s Pat. And it’s not good.

That time and space between the 10:30 p.m. call and 10:30 a.m. the next morning when you walked into the hospital room, 1,200 miles from where you live, are blurry. But look at the strength you had in making the phone calls to your brothers in the middle of the night, packing your clothes and your work laptop, buying the one-way plane ticket and flying from Washington state to Southern California. Saying goodbye to your husband, and your fourth child, the only one left at home still who was a senior in high school. You didn’t know on that January day that you’d miss so much of his senior year, and it’s probably better that you didn’t know.

Twelve hours between departure and arrival. So much can change in twelve hours. So much can change with a moment’s notice. But you already know all this. That’s why you are so good with how quickly things can change. Because they can change, and they do change.

I still see that version of you in 2024. I want you to know that I see you, and I see the exhaustion, the fear, the worry, and the inability to self-regulate. I want to tell you that no matter how overwhelmed you are, everything you are doing makes a difference. No matter how complicated the relationship is with your mother, no matter how fraught it is with angst and worry, you will do and have done everything in your power to make her final months on this earth as beautiful as possible.

When you repeated the phrase to yourself over and over again silently in your head, I heard you.

Even though my mother could not be the kind of mother I needed her to be, I can be the kind of daughter she needs me to be right now.

I know that you repeated that phrase on a daily basis, like a mantra, to remind you to stay present, to keep showing up, to be there for her no matter how terrified she was of the journey.

Sarah, I wish I could tell you to believe in yourself in the way that others who love you believe in you. Because you hold a kind of strength and resilience that many others don’t have. This period of eight months of caring for your mother will be some of the most exhausting months of your life. You will lose so much of yourself in the process, but I promise that you will eventually return to yourself again.

Flying back and forth from Washington to California on a monthly basis while still working remotely and trying to be present for your son’s senior year of high school is incredibly challenging. Still, you will continue to do it.

It will not be lost on you that somehow your mother’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer will be a gift of sorts because as soon as the doctor tells your family she has six to twelve months, the first thing you think is: Thank god that I will be able to say goodbye. You will remember that you didn’t get to say goodbye to your father or your daughter when they died—your father when you were five years old and your daughter at birth. That feeling is something that will stay with you for the rest of your life. So being able to say goodbye to your mother does feel like some kind of gift even if the cost of it is a kind of caregiver’s exhaustion that is impossible to describe. Only your bones can understand.

I want to tell you that the exhaustion you feel will eventually go away. It will take time, a lot of time to rest and recover, and you will lose things you didn’t expect to lose along the way: your uterus, your job, your dog, for starters. You will find yourself changed in ways that you can’t even really describe to anyone let alone to yourself. The you that loved to go out with friends and to show up at parties will disappear—and I don’t know if she’ll return or not, but that’s okay. I think that version of you was actually someone just trying so often to be the kind of person you thought your mother wanted you to be. You don’t have to be anyone you don’t want to be anymore.

I remember this period of time for you because I am your future memory of things you are already starting to forget in your past. Except that I don’t really want you to forget some of the things you’d rather not remember. When we forget the past, we forget the resilience and strength we have grown over time. And you have grown.

Here is the thing about those eight months: despite the difficulty of all of the roles you had to take on, you did it because you knew the alternative was worse. You’ve lived the experience of being unable to say goodbye—to your father when you were five, to your daughter at birth. You know what it is to lose someone without ever getting to say I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, because you know as a mother that saving your child is the thing you would do above all else.

You will say goodbye to your mother—you will crawl into bed with her and hold her as she dies. You will tell her that you love her. And you will continue to love others without ever knowing who will die next.

And that’s okay. Because despite the uncertainty, despite the fact that someone you love will die, and despite the fact that it hurts more than anything when they go, you will rise up again in the morning to learn how to love over and over again for the rest of your life.

Until your time has come.

By Sarah Bain

Three Rapid Questions

1. Describe one thing you do to move through fear or uncertainty during caregiving.

   Caregiving is exhausting and all-consuming, so during times of uncertainty, I find myself closing my eyes and breathing deeply. Three breaths — inhaling, holding, releasing. And reminding myself that this, too, is temporary. Everything is. When I open my eyes again, I look for the beauty and the light, because it's always there, especially in the darkness.

2. Thinking of someone you admire/respect, name three of their standout qualities/characteristics

   I admire so many different people that it’s hard to imagine just one person, but the things I admire the most in someone are generally things that I am striving to be better at or have more of. So, I love incredibly patient people because I can be known to be very impatient. I always wish for more patience. I also love people who are humble. Humble curiosity is something I strive for each day in everything I do. Finally, I love really smart people who teach me something about the world. I surround myself with persons smarter than me so I can continue to learn. I’m so lucky to be able to have these people in my life.

3. What’s one quote/movie/book that’s inspired you?

   I recently read Raising Hare, by Chloe Dalton and it’s one of the most beautiful meditations on life that I have read in a really long time. I have bought loaned out my book multiple times to whoever will read it.

   “She has taught me patience. And as someone who has made their living through words, she has made me consider the dignity and persuasiveness of silence.”

   ― Chloe Dalton, from Raising Hare: A Memoir

Prompt for discussion:

Writing this letter was more cathartic than I expected, and I really felt as if I tapped into a part of myself that still needed to be heard. I needed to offer myself more grace and be less hard on myself, and I think this letter has helped me do that. So I’ll ask you the same: What do you need to forgive yourself for?

Please like ‘❤️’ the article to guide others here.