Swing

The forth and back of caregiving

Everyone is nourished and augmented by the other.
~Hélène Cixous

Happy belated New Year, dear readers.

It has been nearly three months since I have written. I disappeared from this space to take care of myself, as well as to focus on the gargantuan task of executing my dad’s estate. Thanks for your patience and for the kind and generous responses to my last post.

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Swing

It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.

~Frida Kahlo

A blast of joy fills my chest like a burst of water from the school fountain. A cool breeze caresses my face as my legs stretch out into the air. Hips squished into the black rubber seat, identical to the three beside it on the elementary school playground, all filled with younger swingers.

Here I sit, despite grief’s sudden upheavals. Anticipatory grief. Ambiguous grief. Absent grief. Despite the staggering effort of simultaneous caregiving and executrix duties.

Wind in my hair, sun on my cheeks, feet shooting out like flares into an unbelievably bright sky, then knees bending back, feet tucked under for maximum throttle. Each round harvesting velocity.

Overhead, a gang of greyish birds surges through the November blue, yields sideways, tumbles downward, sprints forward. Forages for more height, speed, lightness.

Overheard: a meditation teacher share on a podcast recently that there are 14 billion years of earth behind us, and 14 billion years still to come.

Here I sit. In the middle of all this past and future, my body planted on the swing, my heart a metronome, riffing with amazement, gratitude.

Beside me, two kids are riding tandem while another two twist their seats around the metal daisy chains that hold them, then unravel slowly, their faces painted into bouncy grins. More kids giggle and holler on the monkey bars, spider web and zipline, their play so freeing, unself-conscious, collapsing all sense of impossible.

After a few lovely forth and back glides, feeling the wind against these life-weathered cheeks, the dizziness comes. I have to slow down, plant my feet into the woodchips to ground.

At times I feel as young as these 5-12 year-olds, giggle with them, invite their wonder, share my own at the world around us. But I am nearly 58. And these last five months since dad’s death and five years since Gregory’s diagnosis and dad’s declining physical and cognitive health have seen me swing into more adult duties than I have ever had to.

Power of attorney. Health representative. Estate executor and beneficiary. Caregiver to husband, dad, and now to dad’s wife. Dresser, bather, prep cook, driver. Problem solver. Seller of a house I didn’t buy and owner of another I didn’t buy either.

In the swing, I sit, still as I need to be to recover my equilibrium. Meanwhile a restless joy ticks away in me, my heart rumbling with delight at the changing constellations of the birds above the trees. There is something about their collectiveness, their playful skybanter, their waltzing with each other. Something about how free yet tied to their neighbours.

I wonder, who decides when to turn wing to wind next? Which way? Does the wind help them do their bidding? Do they ever get dizzy?

Down here there is both freedom and dizziness. Empowerment in the tasks and the vertigo of their fractal expansions. And yet the help that comes in the bodies of friends, neighbours, and strangers on the other end of phone lines and online chats. In the bodies of colleagues. Of realtor, lawyer, accountant, doctor, acupuncturist, massage therapist, nurse, moving man.

We have been doing it for decades, Gregory and I. Enveloped in an intimate dance, my husband and I twirl, twist, spin, sway. Spread all our limbs out and wrap back in again as a delirious joy breezes in, causes our hearts to pound, lips to arc into ebullient grins.

When his body is so wracked with pain, discomfort his bedfellow, I don’t ask and he doesn’t offer. Instead, I lie beside him at night, rest my hand on his tremoring one to quiet it, and me, swing my knees up over his, a move impossible if we were standing.

I don’t know how much longer he will be able to drive, cook, walk without a walker. I don’t know how long until he will need a bathtub chair, or a feeding tube.

“Have a great day with the kiddiwinkses,” he wishes as I breeze out the sliding glass door each morning. He knows how my time with them fills me up, re-sources my joy, wonder.

I don’t know how much longer I will be able to go out during the day to work with the kids.

The other day, after finishing our salad and chicken strips at the RnR diner, a 50’s inspired restaurant with black and white vinyl seats and walls postered with vintage cars and spirited quotations by coiffed women, I lifted him from his seat into a spontaneous dance to the horns and drums of the era’s big band music.

The last time I was there was the day my dad died. His wife and my sister beside me on the vinyl seats. A few blocks drive from the hospital, when we returned, they had moved his bed into the palliative ward, and were adjusting his medication for comfort only.

Earlier that day when the three of us first arrived at dad’s hospital bed, he proclaimed: “I have no more choices left, I have used all my choices.”

I feel pretty squished in this swing, my bum too big, thighs too wide. Here they may ask me for help with anything, and know I will respond. Like Gregory. Like my dad.

Ahava will do it. Ahava can do it. Ahava is doing it. Has done it. And you know what else she is doing?

She is flying this machine of her life, swinging with the wind of confiscations and achievement, on the phone, in person, north and south of the 49th parallel. Fueled by desire and duty and beauty, her breasts propellors, her vulva an engine, her heart a throttle.

She is equipped for euphoria and administration. Equipped for gratitude and sunshine and loss. Equipped, she is an analog flyer. She named her school STEM project paper airplane Air Ahava.

What else fuels her? Her Buddhist practice, art-making practice, loving inquiry practice. Grace and feeling loving and being loved. Especially feeling loved. And she does, I do.

Oh and how I love to feel loved. Even as I possess and dismantle houses, sign bank drafts and prepare taxes, tuck t-shirts into my Lovey’s jeans and spoon-feed pesto into his ready mouth.

Still sitting here as I swing through vulnerability and lightness, all the intimacy and resilience that is possible and available.

Breathe.

Sigh. Weep. Quiver. Revel. Laugh.

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Thanks for reading!

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