For the Caregivers

Traveling between realms

Today is the two-year anniversary of my father’s death, and the 21-year anniversary of my marriage. Loss and love and heartache and hope, all at once. A wobbly, spinning, over-stuffed season of emotion for me, someone who is always a bit on the full side with emotions. 

I decided I would share this poem I wrote two springs ago, when I was traveling most days from my home in the Hudson Valley to where my father lay dying in Litchfield County Connecticut, and I felt rather alone with him in the heavy burden of his suffering. It was a time in my life when I felt acutely aware of how different it was to be a caregiver, who lived in constant anticipation and preoccupation of the needs of another; and to have a body that mostly felt concern for its own needs. My children’s infancies were another time in which the stark difference between these two realms was revealed. As caregivers we move regularly between these realms—the realm of the well, and whole, and one-bodied; and the world in which our selves become co-mingled with our dependents. It can be a disorienting, surreal and jarring journey.

I wrote this poem seeking to describe that journey, and the classical reference was meaningful to me, as my father was a Professor of Classics. Persephone’s split life, we know, affected her caregiver, her mother, Demeter—it gave us the seasons, after all, the barren frost of winter a mother’s grief. But how was it, I wondered, for the traveler?

So I share this in honor of the caregivers, whatever that work looks like for you in this season. I travel beside you.

A Trip to Hades
By Maggie Pouncey

When I return from the underworld,
I need to lie in the sun, face tilted skyward,
Till my eyelids burn gold. 
I need to feel itchy flecks of grass between my toes
And smell piney needles in the canopy above. 
When I return from the underworld, 
Where my father lies, half-dead—
Or as I said to my husband as we 
brought home his few belongings, 
It’s like he pre-died,
And I laughed because it was a good line,
And he’d always loved a good line, my dad—
The shame of illness blankets me. 
I take a hot bath to wash it off. 
It is hard to remember who he was 
before he wasn't that anymore. 

He loved to tell stories, all the accents right,
A performance, and I, the attentive audience—
The boarding school years, the Jesuit years, the Oxford years. 
It was bloody Camelot, he said of the Columbia years. 
The same stories and lines over and over — 
A habit turned ominous once he started to forget. 
In the underworld, I want to say something honest, 
I tell him, I love you. You were exceptional.
I’ve never known anyone quite like you, Dad, you’re a true original.
We all did our best, he says, as I smooth his hair and fix his covers. 
Some of us more than others, I say, and he smiles.
He still likes it when I say the cheeky thing.
When I return from the underworld
I need to remember that this too is life—
The homework, the trombone,
the shin guards, the showing up.

I think of Persephone, returning every spring—
Up, up, to the overworld, to the grass and sun and pine 
And did she feel grateful and did she feel soiled
In all the senses, and did she wish to go back 
And also never to go back?