Caretaking Quotes

“Caregiving requires the intention of love, caretaking requires the intention of fear. Not acting in anger when you are angry requires the intention of love.”

“Owing to a poorly defined sense of self, people with BPD rely on others for their feelings of worth and emotional caretaking. So fearful are they of feeling alone that they may act in desperate ways that quite frequently bring about the very abandonment and rejection they're trying to avoid.”

“The corn is planted first, followed by beans, then squash between the rows.They are called the Three Sisters. They sustain each other, the earth, and us. But the Big Ones do not know that. They do not care for the earth, and its children, properly.”

“I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there’s a little fire burning in there, a few steadily glowing embers, and a quiet chant going on, from me, from some singer in me, honoring and accompanying W’s soul, which is with him as he is making his passage. ..there’s a leavetaking in process, a movement towards increasing simplicity, away from complexity, activity, expectation. The bout of paranoia, with a childlike quality of being threatened, seems part of that-like a day or two when he couldn’t just let go and float on the energies of other people, who are bearing him up-but had to doubt them, struggle. So much better when he can trust and float. There’s enough love around him to carry him now…”

“But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane?All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.”