Pour Pause Pay Attention 5

The house is quiet now. Christopher is in treatment. And Cyndi is standing in her kitchen with no idea what to do with herself. Episode 5 of Pour. Pause. Pay Attention. asks the question every caregiver eventually faces — who are you when there is no one to take care of?

Transcript

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Welcome back to Take Care of Time, the tales and the exhales of caregivers. I'm your host, Beverly Nance. And today I want to start with something that's been sitting with me all week. It is a question, a simple one, but one that I think a lot of caregivers never get to ask because they are always too busy answering other people's questions. The question is this, who are you when there is no one to take care of? Not in a physiological way I mean, practically, concretely. If you woke up tomorrow and the person that you're caring for was somehow safe and being cared for by someone else, if the appointments were handled and the medications were managed, and you had a whole day, a whole week, a whole stretch of time that belonged entirely to you, what would you do with it? Would you know? Because here's the thing that I've learned from talking to caregivers, from being a caregiver over the years. Here's the thing that this series Pour, Pause, and Pay Attention is really about underneath all the wine, the winemaking, and the pill organizers, and the parking lot phone calls. Caregiving, it becomes an identity, not just a role, an identity. And when the caregiving changes, when the person you have been caring for is suddenly somewhere else, or when the nature of what they need from you shifts in a fundamental way, there is a kind of grief that nobody talks about. Not grief for a person. They are still here. Grief for the version of yourself that only existed in relation to them. Today, we find out what happens to Cindy when the house goes quiet. Has your house ever gone quiet? Have you had a week of respite, a day of respite, even an evening of respite where the house was just quiet? The house is quiet because Christopher left on Tuesday morning. The facility that he was checking into was about 40 minutes from their house, up into the hills on the east side of the valley. Cindy had driven the route twice before the actual day. Once on a Saturday when Christopher was at physical therapy just to know what it felt like. Just to sit in the parking lot and look at the building and make it real in her mind before she had to make it real in her life. I remember thinking when I first heard this detail that she drove twice, that she needed to rehearse, and I thought, "Hmm, well, of course she did," because that is what caregivers do. They prepare. They rehearse. They do the emotional work in advance, so they can hold it together when it counts. The morning itself was surprisingly ordinary. They had coffee together. Christopher ate toast. He had packed a bag the night before, a duffel bag that had been sitting by the bedroom door since Sunday, which Cindy had been carefully not looking at every time she walked pass it. They did not talk about what was happening, not directly. They talked about small things, whether she would call the landscaper about the side yard, whether Denny needed the insurance documents from the filing cabinet. The particular conversational grace of two people who love each other and have decided wordlessly to make the hard thing gentle. When they Got to the facility, a counselor named Marcus met them at the front entrance. He had a presence that filled the room without taking up too much space in it. Calm, warm, unhurried. He shook Christopher's hand. He looked in Christopher's eye, not with pity, with something closer to recognition, like he had seen him before, like he knew what it cost to walk through that door. Cindy walked past Christopher to the intake area. There was paperwork. There's always paperwork. She helped where she could and stepped back when she was supposed to. And she watched Christopher sit across from the intake counselor and answer questions in a voice that was steady in a way that must have cost him something. At a certain point, Marcus reappeared at her elbow. He said gently that it was time. She understood what that meant. She went to Christopher. She put her hand on his arm, not to hug, not a dramatic gesture, just her hand on his arm the way she might if she were sitting in a restaurant and she wanted to say something without using words. He covered her hand with his. She said, "I will be here when you're ready." He nodded. She walked back through the automatic doors. She sat in the car for nineteen minutes before she started it. She drove home, and then she stood in the kitchen of her quiet house and had absolutely no idea what to do with herself. I wanna talk about the quiet because I think caregivers spend so much time wishing for it, the quiet, the space, the hour that belongs to no one but you. We dream about it sometimes. We think about it in the middle of managing everything. What it would feel like just to have a minute, just one uninterrupted, unneeded, unresponsible minute, and then the quiet arrives, and it's nothing like we had imagined because the quiet that caregivers imagine is the quiet of relief, the quiet of having set something down and stretched your arms out and taken a full breath. The quiet that actually arrives when the caregiving changes is different. It is the quiet of absence, and absence, it turns out, is loud in its own particular way. Cindy stood in the kitchen for a while. Then she made herself another cup of coffee, even though she did not really want one. Then she walked through the living room and straightened a throw pillow that did not need straightening. Then she stood in the doorway of her bedroom, looked at the space where the duffel bag had been. The carpet had a slight indentation where it had sat. She looked at the indentation for longer than made sense. And maybe you have felt that too. Maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about, the way absence has a texture, the way the space a person occupied continues to hold their shape even after they're gone, the way a house that was too full suddenly seems too empty. And both of those things are true, and neither of them is an exaggeration. Caregiving fills every corner of your life. When it changes, even temporarily, even for good reasons, the corners are still there, and they echo. I wanna spend some time on something that I do not think gets enough attention, in conversations about caregiving, and that is caregiver identity loss. Now, when most people hear the phrase caregiver identity, they think it means the caregiver has given up their identity for the caregiving, and that is part of it. The career paused or ended, the friendships that quietly faded, the hobbies abandoned, the version of yourself that had plans and desires and a sense of personal future that existed independently of another person's medical condition, that kind of identity loss is real, and it is painful, and it is one of the most common things that caregivers describe when they have a safe space to talk honestly. But there is another layer that is less talked about, and that is the way caregiving itself becomes an identity. Because caregiving is not just something you do. After a certain point, it is something you are. It shapes how you move through the world. It shapes your schedule, your thinking, your emotional landscape. It shapes the way you relate to other people and the way other people relate to you. You become known in the community and in your own mind as the person who is caring for someone. And when that changes, when that caregiving shifts, even in a positive direction, even in a direction of healing, there is a loss involved that is genuinely difficult to name. Because who are you now? Not the caregiver, not anymore, not in the same way. Then who? Researchers who study caregiver health and well-being have a term for this. They call it role transition grief. It is the grief that accompanies any significant change in caregiving status, not just the death of a loved one, but any major shift. A loved one entering a facility like Christopher, a spouse beginning treatment, a parent moving to a care home, an adult child finally becoming more independent. All of these transitions can trigger a grief response that looks, from the outside, confusing because the person is still here. Things are getting better. This is what you wanted. So why do you feel like crying in the quiet kitchen over a duffel bag indention in the carpet? Because grief does not require loss of life. It only requires loss. And what Cindy had lost, or rather what she was in the process of releasing, which is different from losing, was a version of herself she had been for two years. The woman who tracked down medications and drove to appointments and kept the log and made the call and sat in the parking lot working up the courage to say the thing that needed to be said. The woman was still here, but her job description had just changed dramatically, and she had not quite figured out what came next. She went to the garage on the first night. Of course she did. That is where Cindy went when she needed to think, when she needed to feel competent, when she needed to be in the presence of something that was alive and transforming, entirely governed by its own logic, something that she did not need to manage, something that did not need her to manage it so much as tend it. She went to the new carboy first, the one that she had set out at two in the morning, weeks ago, when she could not sleep after a Sunday conversation. She had since filled it, a small batch of wine, a varietal she had never worked with before. One that she had read about and been curious about and kept setting aside for someday. And She had finally gone to someday. Wines are grapes with a reputation. Some wines are considered more difficult, more demanding. It needs more heat, more time, more time on the vine, more patience for the winemaker. Some of the grapes do not perform quickly or easily. Left to itself before it is ready, it produces something thin and unsatisfying. But given the right conditions and enough time, it becomes something genuinely remarkable, deep, complex, with layers that reveal themselves slowly and a finish that stays with you long after the glass is empty. Cindy had chosen it on purpose. She checked the fermentation. The color was already building. The characteristic deep ruby, almost purple at the edges. The temperature was right. The air lock was bubbling steadily. That particular sound that winemakers learn to read the way a doctor reads a pulse, alive, working, on its way to something. She sat down on the stool she kept in the corner of the garage. She opened her notebook. She had written at the top of the batch page, in the moment she was finally ready to name it. The name she had carried in the back of her mind since that two in the morning hour, still here. She read it now and thought about what it meant tonight, specifically with Christopher forty-five minutes away and the house quiet and her whole body was trying to figure out what to do with itself. Still here. He was still here, in the world, in treatment, in the process of becoming something she could not quite yet see. She was still here, in the garage, in this life, in the process of figuring out the same thing. The batch was still here, just beginning, asking nothing but time and attention and the willingness to show up and check on it every day, even when it did not seem like much was happening. She wrote in her notebook, "Still here. Still here does not mean unchanged. It means continuing, and continuing right now is everything. A pen on paper, an airlock bubbling softly, I wanna take a few minutes here to talk about the residential treatment actually looks like for family members who are not at the facility, because I think it's a significant gap between what people imagine and what movies and television have shown us, and what the reality is for most families navigating this. The image we have inherited from pop culture is usually dramatic. Intervention scenes, rock bottom moments, tearful family visits, breakthroughs in group sessions, a thirty-day program, and then a transformed person walks out ready to live a whole new life. In reality, it's quieter, more administrative, more uncertain, and in some ways, more demanding of the family member on the outside than the person on the inside. Here is what Cindy was navigating during the weeks Christopher was in treatment. Contact was limited, especially in the early days. Most residential programs restrict phone calls and visits in the first week or two, not as punishment, but because the early phase of treatment is about building internal stability. The person in treatment needs to develop their own sense of groundedness Before they reintroduce the relational dynamics of their outside life. For the family member, this means waiting with no real information, with a phone that is not ringing, with a particular anxiety of not knowing how the person you love is doing, while also being expected to trust that they are being cared for. That requires a significant act of faith. And here is the thing about faith in caregivers. We are not great at it. Not because we are not spiritually inclined or emotionally resilient. Clearly, we are. We have been proving that for years. But because caregiving trains you to trust information over faith, data over hope, the log over the feeling. You learn to rely on what you can see and measure and track. And now you are being asked to simply believe that the person you love is okay when you cannot see them or measure their progress or track anything at all. This is genuinely hard. The second thing treatment asked of Cindy was something even more unexpected. It asked her to do her own work. Most residential treatment programs for opioid dependency include a family component, not a peripheral one, a central one, because addiction does not happen in isolation. It happens inside relationships, and those patterns, however loving, however well-intentioned, n-need to be examined and understood and often changed. Cindy received a call from the facility in the second week. A family counselor named Rina introduced herself. She explained the family program, weekly group sessions, individual sessions available, educational workshops on addiction and recovery. And then she said something that Cindy did not expect. She said, "Mrs. Marlowe, the work you do in this program is not about Christopher. It's about you." Cindy sat with that for a long time after the call. It is about you. When was the last time anything had been about her? The first family group session was on a Thursday evening. There were seven people in the room. Cindy was the only one there for a spouse. There were two parents, a father with his hands clapped so tightly his knuckles were pale, a mother who had clearly cried recently and was determined not to cry again, a young woman about twenty-five sitting very straight there for her brother, two siblings, and a woman about Cindy's age, well-dressed, who looked like someone accustomed to being confident and was not quite sure what to do in a room that required her to be something else. Cindy Recognized the woman immediately, not because she knew her, because she was looking at herself. Rina ran the group with a particular skill, the skill of asking questions that seemed simple and turned out to be profound. She started by asking each person to say one word that described how they felt, describe how they were feeling right now. Not a sentence, one word. The father said, "Scared." The mother said, "Hopeful," with a slight catch in her voice and turned the word into a small prayer. The young woman said, "Angry," without apology. A well-dressed woman said, after a pause, "Lost." Cindy said, "Still." Rina looked at her, not to push, just to offer space if she wanted to say more. Cindy said, "Like everything finally stopped moving, and I do not know yet if that is a relief or a problem." And something happened in the room then, a collective exhale. Like seven people had been waiting for someone to say the thing that none of them had the words for. And maybe you have felt that too, the moment in a group of people, strangers even, when someone says the true thing that you feel in your chest before you even process it in your brain. Like, yes, like that. Like, I thought it was just me. It is never just you. Something shifted in Cindy during those first weeks, slowly in the way that real shifts always happen. Not dramatically, not overnight, but in small accumulations. A Thursday evening group session, a Saturday morning in the garage, a long walk through the neighborhood on a Sunday when she had no appointments to drive to and no log to update or nothing to manage except her own thoughts. She started sleeping differently. Not better exactly in the beginning, but differently. The hypervigilance that had been her companion for two years, the low-grade alertness that never fully switched off, even in sleep, that kept one ear tuned to the sounds of the house, even when she was exhausted, began very gradually to ease. She noticed at first when she woke up in the morning and realized she had slept through until seven without surfacing to check the time or listen for sounds from the other side of the bed. Seven o'clock, she lay in the bed for a few minutes just noticing that. Then she got up and went to the garage. She had been making more wine, not because she had a plan for it, but because the making of it felt necessary. The wine was progressing beautifully. The petite sirah she had bottled and labeled and stood in a careful row on the second shelf, twelve bottles of something she was proud of. She had started a new batch the previous week. A white wine this time because she had never made a white and because Rina had said something in the Thursday session about the importance of trying new things she had been deferring. Rina had been talking about therapy techniques. Cindy had been thinking about wine. The application was the same. And here is the thing. What stayed with me when I heard Cindy describe this period of how quite revolutionary it was, she was not having a dramatic transformation. She was not suddenly thriving or flourishing and living her best life. She was just doing small things that were hers, sleeping until seven, starting a white wine, going for walks with no destination, calling her friend Darla, who she had not properly talked to in months, and letting the conversation go wherever it wanted to go. Small things. But the accumulation of small things is how caregivers come back to themselves, not in the big dramatic moment, in the small ones, one morning at a time. I wanna talk about caregiver recovery. Not recovery from illness, recovery from caregiving, because I think we understand intellectually that caregivers carry significant physical and emotional burdens. We understand the burnout in the abstract. We know the statistics. Caregivers have higher rates of depression, anxiety, physical illness, social isolation than non-caregiving adults. We know the research. But what we talk about less is what recovery actually looks like, what caregivers actually need when the acute phase of caregiving changes Here is what research tells us, and here is what I have heard from caregivers directly, And here is what I believe with everything in me. The first thing caregivers need is permission. Permission to feel complicated feelings, the relief, the grief, the anger, the guilt about the relief, the guilt about the anger, the strange emptiness, the tentative joy that creeps in sometimes and feels all wrong because we've not fully resolved it yet. All of it is allowed. You do not have to feel grateful for your freedom before you feel sad about what you lost to get there. You do not have to feel optimistic before you've finished grieving. You are allowed to be exactly where you are. The second thing caregivers need is reconnection. Not to other people necessarily, though it matters. Reconnection to themselves, to the interests and the instincts and desires that got quiet during the caregiving. To the version of themselves that existed before the role consumed everything. For Cindy, that was the wine. The white wine she had never made before. The Saturday morning in the garage with no agenda. The phone call to Darla. For you, it might be something different. A garden that has been neglected, a instrument you used to play, a type of cooking you used to love and have not attempted in years, a creative practice that always made you feel like yourself. The question is not whether you deserve to reconnect to these things, because you do, unequivocally. The question is whether you believe you do. And that belief, that foundational, non-negotiable understanding that you are a full person with legitimate needs and desires that exist entirely independently of your caregiving role, That is often what needs the most rebuilding. The third thing that caregivers need is community. Not necessarily therapy, though therapy is genuinely valuable, but the experience of being in a room with people who truly understand, people who do not look at you with sympathetic incomprehension, people who know without being told that when you say it is complicated, you mean something that would take three hours to explain properly, and you are too tired to explain it, but you need to say it anyway. This is why Cindy kept going to the Thursday sessions. Not because she needed the content, but because she needed the room. The room where seven people who all knew something about carrying impossible things sat together once a week and said Still. Christopher called on day sixteen. She had not been counting the days. She had been very deliberately not counting the days, but she knew it was day sixteen. The call was brief, fifteen minutes, and the counselors were present, which changes the quality of the conversation in ways that are hard to describe. It makes everything slightly formal, slightly careful, like speaking through glass. He sounded tired. He sounded like himself. He asked about the wine. Not about the house, not about Denny, not about the business, about the wine. And she told him about the wine and the petite Syrah standing in a row of the second shelf, and she could hear something in his voice that she had not heard in a long time. Interest. Real, present, genuine interest in something outside himself, like a light coming back on. Not fully, not yet, but flickering. Before she hung up, he said, "Save me a glass of wine." She said she would. She held the phone for a while after the call ended. Then she went to the garage and sat with a glass of wine for a while. Just sat with it, watching it breathe through the airlock, thinking about what it would taste like when it was ready. Thinking about who would drink the first glass and when, and whether the occasion Would feel like what she was imagining or something else entirely. What stayed with me about this, what I have thought about many times since I first heard it, is the simplicity of the moment. A woman in her garage, a batch of wine still weeks from being ready. A promise made about a glass that could not yet be poured. And in the simple, ordinary moment, something that felt very much like hope. Not certainty, not resolution, not a happy ending, just hope. The tentative early morning, this might become something kind of hope. The kind that, like wine, needs time and darkness and the right conditions before it becomes what it is capable of being. I wanna come back to the name that she gave the batch, Still Here, because I think the important thing in this whole series, more important than the Sackler family history, more important than the warning signs of dependency, more important even than the log or the call, the appointment, and the hard Sunday conversation Still here is that what Christopher was. It is what Cindy was. It is what their marriage was, bruised and tested, and not what either of them had planned, but still present. Still something, still worth tending, still capable of transformation if given the right conditions. And it is what I wanna say to every caregiver listening today. You are still here. After everything this role has asked of you, after all the appointments you've managed while running on four hours of sleep, after the insurance calls that took forty-five minutes and resolved nothing, after the nights you lay in the dark listening to and worrying and caring and grieving, after the moments you've held it together in public and fell apart in private, after the version of your life you have set aside and the version of yourself that got quiet, you are still here. You're still here, and still here is not nothing. Still here is everything. Because caregiving, it does something to you, something that cannot be undone. It changes your capacity for patience, your ability to sit with discomfort, your understanding of what actually matters, your tolerance for what does not. It changes the way you love. It changes the way you hold space for someone else's pain and the way you recognize in a room full of strangers, the particular exhaustion in a set of shoulders that tells you, "This person knows what I know." Those changes are not damages. They are pressing. The second pressing, the third pressing, all the pressure and the patience and the time that turns something ordinary into something complex and layered and worth paying attention to. That is what you are. This is what caregiving made you, still here and worth every patient, attentive, hopeful moment of tending. This is the final episode of Pour Pause Pay Attention, and I want to close in a way Cindy would close it, not with resolution, because Cindy and Christopher's story is not resolved. Christopher is in treatment, and treatment takes time, and the road ahead is long and real and uncertain in a way that all roads worth traveling are. Not a lesson, because you are caregivers. You do not need me to tell you what this story means. You already know. You are carrying all the knowledge in your bodies, your notebooks, and your two-word log journals, and your garage hours for longer than I have been talking. I wanna close with a question: What is still here? What is the thing, the batch, the practice, the hour, the relationship, the version of yourself that has survived everything that this season of your life has thrown at you, and you're still present, still alive, still asking for your attention? Whatever it is, go tend it. Pour something into it. Pause long enough to feel it and pay attention because the things that survive the pressing are almost always the things that are worth drinking. Before we close this series completely, I wanna mention the Take Care Time Respite Box one more time because this whole series, Cindy's garage, her batches, her notebook, her hours of quiet tending has been, At its heart, about the same thing the Respite Box is about, the non-negotiable right of every caregiver to have something that is just for them. The May/June box is wine themed. It was chosen with intention and with you in mind. Every item in it was selected to honor the part of you that is still here even after everything the season has asked of you. You can find it at takecaretime.com. That's takecaretime.com. If you have been listening to this series, and if you felt seen and Cindy's story has touched something in your heart, has touched something in your life, please consider giving yourself the Respite Box as a gift. Not a reward for surviving, not something that you have to earn, just a yes for yourself, a small, intentional, lovely yes. You deserve that. And finally, I wanna hear from you. If this series, if this episode, any moment, any line, has landed somewhere real for you, I wanna know. If you have a caregiving story that you have been quietly carrying, and you are ready, even just a little bit to share it, I am here. You can reach me at podcast@takecaretime.com. That is podcast@takecaretime.com. Your story will be treated with the same intention that Cindy treated her wine, carefully, attentively, with respect for the complexity and the time it took to get here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for the particular courage it takes to press play on a podcast about caregiving when you are right in the middle of it. That takes something. I know it does, and I see you. Season three continues with a new series coming soon. And you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if Pour, Pause, and Pay Attention has meant something to you, please leave a review and share it with someone who needs it because the best thing this podcast can do is find the caregivers who are sitting in a car or in the parking lot right now working up the courage to make the call they already know they need to make and let them know that they are not alone. Please note that this episode features reenactments and dramatized details, and 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 individuals involved, names and some identifying details have been changed. Until next week, take care.