Pour Pause Pay Attention

Cyndi Marlowe names every batch of wine she makes. Not for anyone else — just for herself. It is the one thing in her life that asks nothing of her. When her husband Christopher survives a traumatic fall at work, Cyndi becomes his full-time caregiver overnight. She tracks the medications, attends the appointments, reads the discharge paperwork four times. She does everything right. But in Episode 1 of Pour. Pause. Pay Attention., we learn something every caregiver knows and rarely admits — that managing everything and seeing everything are not the same thing.

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welcome back to Take Care Time, the Tales and the Exhales of Caregivers. I'm your host, Beverly Nance, this series is called Pour Pause, pay Attention, There's a moment just before the grapes give up everything they're holding. When the press goes still, wine makers call it the pause. It is a space between pressure and release between what the fruit was and what it is becoming between the effort of the harvest and the patients required to wait. Cindy knew this pause. She learned to live inside of it. This is a story about a woman. Who made wine in her garage is also a story about what she missed while she was paying attention to the grapes and what she almost lost by the time she stopped. To understand Cynthia, affectionately known as Cindy, you first have to understand Napa. Okay. Not the Napa of the wine country. Brochures, not the Napa of the weekend getaways and balloon rides over Golden Hills, not the Napa of tasting rooms that smell like oak and lavender and expense. The real Napa Napa Valley sits approximately 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. Tucked between mountains to the west. And the Vaca mountains to the east. The valley floor stretches roughly 30 miles from Calistoga in the north down to the city of Napa. In the south, it is narrow. In some places, barely five miles wide. The rich soil is alive. In a way. Most soil is not volcanic. Rich with minerals that traveled down from rich lines formed millions of years before anyone thought to plant a vineyard. The climate is shaped by morning fog that rolls in from San Pablo Bay, cooling the grapes at night and allowing them to ripen slowly during warm sun soaked afternoons. Wine professionals will tell you that the valley produces some of the most expensive Cabernet sauvignon in the world. That the land, the air, the particular way light falls on a hillside in October cannot be replicated anywhere else. But the people who live here year round will tell you something different. They will tell you that NAPA is expensive, that it has changed, that longtime residents have been slowly priced out of the town their grandparents built that. The tourism economy created a kind of beautiful pressure, a valley that serves the world's appetite for luxury while its service workers commute from Vallejo and Fairfield because they can no longer afford to stay. They will tell you that the traffic on Highway 29 during harvest season is a particular kind of patience test. The wildfire season is real and recurring and quietly terrifying that the valley is stunning and complicated and achingly human all at once. This, the city of Napa itself distinct from the valley and often overlooked in favor of its more glamorous northern neighbors like St. Helena. And Ville sits at the southern end of the valley where the Napa River bends south toward the bay. It is a real city, grocery stores, hardware stores, and schools and traffic lights, neighborhoods of modest craftsmen, homes with tidy front yards and basketball hoops in driveways. A downtown that has been revitalized over the past 20 years, brew pubs and restaurants a restored opera house on First Street, but it is also a city where working families live quietly in the shadow of one of the world's most famous luxury destinations where ordinary life happens between the vineyards. This is where Cindy lived. Not in the valley floor, among the estate wineries, not in the guest cottage with a view of a cave cellar in a house on a street in the middle of Napa, where the neighbors had vegetable gardens and dogs had barked on Tuesday mornings and shared understandings that the wine country lifestyle, the one in the magazines, was something that existed nearby. And was lovely to look at, but not quite theirs. Cindy didn't mind. She had the grapes. Cynthia Marlowe, Cindy, to everyone who knew her was 44 years old when the accident happened. She was the kind of woman who finished what she started, who kept a running grocery list on the refrigerator door. Who called her mother every Sunday evening without needing a reminder. Who learned somewhere in her mid thirties that the best way to manage the fullness of her life was to make things with her hands? She had tried pottery, abandoned it after three sessions when the clay refused to cooperate, she had tried knitting a scarf for Christopher's birthday and unraveled it twice before accepting that patience and yarn were incompatible with her particular temperament. Then eight years ago, she had attended a micro wine making seminar at a small local shop on Browns Valley Road. It was a Saturday morning course, three hours, $20. She had gone mostly because her friend Daria, had a gift card and didn't wanna go alone. She had left with a kit, a notebook, and something. She hadn't expected a calling. Micro batch? Wine making is exactly what it sounds like. Small volumes. Home equipment, a deliberate, intimate relationship with a process that most people only encounter at the end in a glass across the table. Years after the work was done, Cindy started with a five gallon kit of Merlott from a home wine making supply store. It was modest, slightly tannic. A little rough on the finish. She loved it completely. She loved the patience. It required the waiting, the daily monitoring, the way the process had a logic to it, not rigid, but structured. She loved that wine, rewarded attention and punished, neglect that every variable mattered. Temperature, oxygen, exposure, timing. She loved that there was something to check on over the following years, she expanded. A small fermentation corner in her garage became a proper workspace. Wire shelving, a temperature controlled cabinet, five gallon carboys lined up in careful rows, a notebook system, meticulous color coded tracking every batch from primary fermentation to final bottling. She scoured grapes locally, a small family vineyard in, Carneros agreed to sell her modest quantities, each harvest surplus fruit technically from rows that weren't part of their estate blend. She named every batch. This was non-negotiable. Her first successful Cabernet Sauvignon was called First Try a Rose. She made during a particular difficult. Spring, she labeled, still standing. A Zinfandel. She produced during the year. Christopher's business first exceeded a million in revenue, was named abundance. The names were private, personal, really shared outside the garage. Christopher thought it was charming. He didn't always understand it, but he thought it was charming. Christopher Marlow was the kind of man who built things, not metaphorically, literally. He had started in construction at 19 swinging a hammer for a framing crew in Solano County. He was physical, precise, and constitutionally incapable of leaving a job unfinished. He worked his way through estimating project management, and eventually at 31 Open Marlow Construction, a commercial and residential contractor serving the greater Napa Valley area. By the time he was 42, he had 15 employees, a solid reputation, a pickup truck with the company logo on the door, and a schedule that kept him five to six days a week on job sites across the valley. He was not a complicated man. He liked coffee with two sugars, college football on Saturdays, cooking on the weekends, real cooking, not heating things up. Elaborate breakfast that left the kitchen smelling like butter and pepper for the rest of the morning. He loved Cindy in a way that was steady and undramatic and entirely reliable. He called her On his lunch break most days, not because anything had happened, but because he liked hearing her voice between the noise of the site. They had been married 16 years, no children, a decision they made together early in the marriage, not without grief, not without revision over the years, but ultimately on their own. Their life was not perfect. No life is. But it was full shaped moving in a direction they had both chosen until a Thursday morning in November. The job site was a renovation project on a hillside property North the city, a large residential estate undergoing a full structural expansion. The crew had been on the site for three weeks. Scaffolding had been erected along the east face of the building to allow access to the second floor framing. Christopher was not supposed to be on the upper platform that morning. He was there because the measurement was off, and he wanted to see it himself because that was how he operated, not delegating what he felt required his own eyes. The scaffolding brace on the upper left section had been improperly secured the previous afternoon. A detail that would later appear in a OSHA incident report a gap between what should have been checked and what was. Christopher stepped onto the platform. The brace gave way. He fell approximately 11 feet. He landed on packed ground, partially on a stack of lumber. His foreman, Denny reached him first. He was conscious. That was the first thing Cindy was told when the phone rang at 10:47 AM Conscious. The word that was supposed to be reassuring, the word that for caregivers marks the beginning of a very long road At Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa. The assessment took several hours. Cervical spine intact fractures. Two ribs on the left side. A hairline fracture on the right wrist. Significant soft tissue trauma to the left shoulder and the one that would change everything. Traumatic brain injury, moderate severity, frontal lobe involvement. Cindy sat in the waiting room chair with her coat still on. She had driven to the hospital so quickly that she arrived, still holding the dish towel from her kitchen counter, she set it on the chair beside her and did not look at it again. Traumatic brain injury TBI is one of the most common and least understood conditions resulting from workplace accidents in the United States. Construction workers account for a dis appropriate number of fall related TBIs. Each year, the frontal lobe located directly behind the forehead. Governs executive function, decision making, impulse control, emotional regulation, personality, expression. When it is damaged, the person who returns home is sometimes, not always, but sometimes not exactly the same person who left. This is not a metaphor, it is neurology. And it is one of the most disorienting experiences a caregiver can face because the face is the same, the voice is recognizable. The hands when they reach for yours feel familiar, but the internal geography has shifted. And the map you were using no longer matches the terrain. Christopher was discharged after five days. The discharge paperwork was 12 pages long. Cindy read it all in the hospital parking garage before starting the car. Follow up with neurology within seven days. Physical therapy three days per week. Occupational therapy evaluation scheduled pain management consultation pending. Avoid screens for the first two weeks. Limit. Cognition, exertion. No driving. No job site activity. No job site activity. She drove home carefully. Christopher sat in the passenger seat with his head tilted slightly toward the window. He didn't speak for most of the drive. Christopher, who called her at lunch most days. Christopher, who narrated his commute when traffic was bad. Christopher, who had talked her through an entire cooking show he'd seen as she drove home from a weekend trip in detail for 45 minutes. Quiet. She didn't push. She filed it under expected, under temporary, under things that could resolve with rest and time and proper care. Caregivers do that. They file the first weeks were structured around appointments. Neurology on Mondays, physical therapy Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Occupational therapy on alternating wednesdays. Pain management had a two week wait, which felt longer than it was. Cindy cleared her freelance consulting schedule. She had worked part-time in organizational communications for small nonprofit since leaving her full-time position six years prior. It wasn't complicated work, but it was hers. She notified Her two current clients explained a family medical situation and asked for a temporary pause. Both clients were understanding, both found someone else within three weeks. She noted this without surprise. She also noted but did not fully processed that her income had effectively just ended the day, settled into a rhythm that was exhausting in its specificity. 6:15 AM coffee medications laid out the pill organizer she had purchased at the pharmacy on the way home from the hospital Monday through Sunday, mornings and evenings. Sitting on the counter like a small plastic calendar of obligation. Christopher had been prescribed four medications at discharge. Two for pain management, one for inflammation, one to support neurological recovery, Cindy tracked all of them. She kept a log in her phone. Date, time dosage, any noted side effects, she had started the log the morning after discharge without anyone telling her to. It was just how her mind worked. Organized the inputs control what can be controlled at the pain management consultation. The physician reviewed Christopher's case and adjusted his regimen. The opioid base medication initially prescribed in the emergency setting was continued standard for the level of orthopedic injury he had sustained. The dosage was specific. The refill schedule noted. Cindy wrote everything down. She always wrote everything down. The garage had been untouched for three weeks. This was the longest cindy had gone without checking on her fermentation in years, one evening in late November when Christopher had fallen asleep earlier than usual. The fatigue from TBI is heavy and unpredictable, arriving without warning and lasting longer than seems reasonable. She walked into the garage and turned on the light. There were two active batches, a Caber Franc. She had started in late September and a small experimental greenish her first time working with that veritable, and she had been watching closely before the accident, interrupted everything. She checked the air locks, measured the specific gravity, noted temperatures adjusted a clamp that had slightly loosened. The Kavanaugh frock was fine. The greenish had drifted. Too warm for too long, not ruined, but altered. She stood in the garage for a long moment, holding her notebook, looking at the grish. Things drift when you look away. She wrote at the top of the batch page in the margin, not as a note about wine as a note about something. She wasn't quite ready to name yet. She labeled the batch, she called it November. The changes in Christopher came in layers, not all at once, not dramatically. Not in a way that would have made them easier to identify in the first weeks. Everything was attributable to the injury itself. Fatigue was expected. Mood fluctuations were expected, difficulty concentrating, frustration over small things. The occasional afternoon where he sat in the living room and stared at nothing for a long stretch of time that made Cindy wanna say something, but didn't all of it. Was documented in the discharge paperwork. All of it was within range. She knew because she had read the paperwork four times. She noted at week three that Christopher seemed more comfortable in the evenings, more settled, more like himself. The tension that lived in his jaw during the late mornings seemed to dissolve by dinner. She noticed that he asked for his evening medication earlier than scheduled. On two occasions, she adjusted the timing slightly reasonable. She thought pain has rhythms, bodies have patterns. She noted in, in her log, she did not connect it to anything. Here is what no one tells you about becoming a caregiver. They don't tell you. How good you will become at holding everything, the schedule, the medications, the appointments, the insurance calls, the way you learn to read another person's face before they speak, to anticipate the shift before it arrives, to adjust, to absorb, to continue. They don't tell you that this skill, this remarkable, exhausting, adaptive skill can become the very thing that obscures what you most need to see when you are managing everything. Everything looks like something has been managed, not something to be questioned. Cindy was good at caregiving. She was organized, thorough, present. She tracked the medications and the appointments and the moods and the meals. She read about TBI recovery online at 11:00 PM while Christopher slept. She attended the neurology appointments. With a printed list of observations, she poured every hour of herself into managing the situation. And then when the day quieted, she walked into the garage. She checked the temperature, she measured the gravity. She wrote in her notebook, and she breathed the wine was a thing that asked nothing of her. It simply became. Slowly with patience according to its own timeline. But here's what Cindy would later understand. Wine is honest. It shows you exactly what has happened to it. Every veritable leaves and mark every hour of incorrect temperature, every moment of oxygen exposure, Every shift in fermentation environment, it doesn't hide what it's been through. People are different. People learn to perform stability, to present the face of routine, even when the interior is drifting as a caregiver, the one who has learned to see everything through the lens of management, Sometimes mistakes, performance for wellness. Cindy saw what was in front of her. She just wasn't asking the right questions. Next time on pour pause, pay attention. Cindy begins to notice small inconsistencies in the medication count. Christopher insist everything is fine and the grish, the batch, you call it November, developed something unexpected in the bottle. A complexity. She didn't plan for a flavor. She can't quite name pain. Medication dependency after traumatic brain injury is more common than most families are told. Studies suggest that patients with TBI are at an elevated risk for opioid misuse due to changes in the brain's reward and regulation systems changes that can be invisible in early recovery. The signs are subtle. And subtle for a caregiver always managing a great deal can be easy to explain away. Next week we go deeper into the fermentation. A note as we close, Cindy has her garage, her notebook, her wine. She has a place that belongs entirely to her even when everything else belongs to the role. If you are a caregiver listening to this, I wanna ask you something. What is yours? Not the to-do list, not the appointment calendar, not the medication log. What is the thing you do or used to do, or have been meaning to try that gives you back to yourself for even an hour Because this is exactly what I built the take care time respite box for, not as an add-on to your caregiving, not as a reward for surviving the week as a reminder that the person during the caregiving matters too. For the rest of April, the Spring Flowers box is available. It is curated for rest, reflection and that specific exhale that caregivers really give themselves permission to take. You can find it@takecaretime.com. And our May box is all about pouring yourself something, pausing, and paying attention to yourself this time. That box will be available beginning May 1st, share your story. Have you ever cared for someone whose personality or behavior shifted after a injury or illness? Did you notice the change gradually or did it arrive all at once and was there something, a hobby, a ritual, a private practice that kept you tethered to yourself during that time? I wanna hear from you. You can reach me at podcasts@takecaretime.com. Because caregivers listening need to hear more than the clinical version, they need to hear the real one. Please note that this episode features reenactments and dramatized details. While in most cases the exact verbatim dialogue may not be known, all dramatizations are grounded in thorough research and crafted to honor the stories shared to respect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals involved names, and some identifying details have been changed. Until next week, take care.