Three Ways to Stake Your Claim on Life When It Is Time to Retire Your Alter-Ego
By Kate Kerry Spencer, author of Smoke: A Story of Love, Lies, and Cigarettes
In every Superhero’s life there comes a time to hang up the cape. Batman never played beach volleyball, or went skiing with friends, or slept in until noon, or read an entire novel over one luxuriously long weekend. But Bruce Wayne did. (Well, ok. In Bruce’s case it was probably more of an angst-filled billionaire’s version of cape-less freedom, but kudos to Bruce for hanging up the cape anyway.)
When Bruce hung up the cape, did Batman forget the people who needed him? Nope. But Bruce understood that unless he took care of himself, he wasn’t going to be much use as a person, much less a superhero. And outside of rescuing, he wasn’t going to have much of a life.
There’s an expansive, therapeutic joy of ordinary life and every Superhero caregiver has the right to reclaim their piece of that territory. Here are three ways to stake your claim to life while still loving and caring for the people in it.
1. Find an Anthem to Restart Your Heart
Early on in my husband’s illness, after pneumonia and subsequent infections had caused both his heart and kidneys to fail, one of our sweetest family members texted us a link to the song, Tell Your Heart To Beat Again, by Danny Gokey.
The directive of the song was perfectly timed. We had come through a heart-stopping siege and though tattered, were ready to move on and reclaim some normalcy to our lives, even if it was a new, sometimes frightening one.
For my husband, that meant reclaiming his freedom outside the walls of a hospital. His reclamation included connecting with friends and talking about something other than health issues, catching up on all the sports he’d missed, resurrecting and reclaiming both work projects and dream projects, and becoming the driver of his car, and his life, instead of the ailing passenger.
For me, it meant reclaiming the freedom outside the role of a caregiver. That included going out for dinner and drinks with girlfriends, exercising in more than just stolen moments, reigniting stalled goals, and driving blissfully solo, singing at the top of my lungs whatever anthem worked for me that day, from Beyonce to Bing Crosby.
The reclamation of my freedom also meant letting my husband have his own independence, enjoyed at his own pace, and letting him find his own anthems, even if they all happened to be the National Anthem played before his favorite games. After watchdogging him for many months, I had to step off to the sidelines so he could do the things he wanted and needed to do on his own without my shadowing his every step, holding my breath or bracing for the next wave of the tsunami.
Those next waves of the tsunami did come, and given the wait my husband now has for a heart transplant, other storms may follow. But in restarting our hearts and lives that first time, we were, and remain, better prepared to weather the waves of change when they hit. As the caregiver in that future scenario, I’ll know exactly where my cape is stored. But I’m not wearing it today.
2. Accept Life’s Shadow and Light
The November morning my mother died, the sun came out in beautiful, blinding force. The driver from the funeral home squinted as he came into the room to pick up my mother’s body.
I remember thinking that morning as I drove away from the care center where Mom had spent the last seven weeks of her life, how brash the sun felt, how oddly out of place. It was as if I had expected the sky to weep at my mother’s passing, so large, so epic a loss it was for me and all who loved her. But the perfect truth was that at the depth of my sorrow that day, the sun still shone.
“So the sun shines on a funeral, just the same as on a birth. The way it shines on everything that happens here on Earth.”
These are the opening lines of Enough to Be On Your Way, a song written by James Taylor.
To me, these are some of the truest words ever written and it’s taken me time and loss to understand them, at least in my own way and interpretation.
Life is its own force and each and all of us are part of its cycles, its shadows and its light. We are matter, and we do matter, but none of us has the power to stop the sun from shining on our days of grief, or the rain from falling on our days of joy.
The one extraordinary power we have is love. To love what is mortal and to embrace the wonder and richness and possibility of life that runs right up alongside its struggles, brevity and loss. That’s the deal with life and love. You simply can’t have one without the other.
Choose love, and the odds are you’ll wear a caregiver’s cape one day. Choose love, and your shoulders will be broad enough to wear that cape, and your spirit will be strong enough to know when it’s time to let it go.
3. RX: Laugh, Cry, Repeat.
If the capacity to love is our super power, the ability to laugh and the willingness to cry are our secret weapons of resilience. Laughing and crying are soulmates, intimately tied together in both the mind and the body. Both responses elicit tears and both are cathartic, resetting our emotions and stressors to more manageable levels and often allowing us to get a few more hours of sleep, too. Tears tell us that something in life has changed or ended, and laugher tells us that something in life tenaciously endures.
One of the best dramatizations of the soulmate relationship between tears and laughter is in the movie Steel Magnolias, written by Robert Harling. Originally a stage play, the story is based on the death of Harling’s sister, Susan.
The movie beautifully, and hilariously, illustrates the bonds of friendship that connect and sustain the female characters through life and loss. The scene following the funeral of Shelby, the character based on Harling’s sister and played by Julia Roberts, is especially powerful in its rapid fire depiction of the integral connection of tears and laughter and what endures after great loss.
Sally Field plays M'Lynn, the mother of Shelby. In this scene she and her friends have just left the funeral and M'Lynn asks for a mirror to check her face.
This scene gets me every time, both the depth of the grief and the grace of the laughter. (And the butt of the joke that breaks the tension, Ouiser Boudreax, played by Shirley McClain, gets plenty of love in later scenes.)
In your role as a caregiver--in full cape, on hiatus, or nearing the end of extended service-- give yourself plenty of love, too. Trust in life’s resilience, and your own.
About Kate
Kate Kerry Spencer is a Pacific Northwest writer, editor, and publisher. Learn more about her upcoming memoir, Smoke: A Story of Love, Lies and Cigarettes.
Smoke is the story of fatal consolations--tobacco, denial and deceit--and the second chances that can come to us in the most unlikely places. For this mother and daughter it was a rehab center where the two women wrestled with cigarettes, scrambled brains and each other--and in the process, found the long way back to love.