The Burden of Caring
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The Burden of Caring
John Paul Derryberry
I find myself all alone in a rare moment in my currently chaotic life. I just wished two friends good-bye after they brought their newborn to meet our girls this weekend. The wife has our under-weather dog out on a run, and the girls are sleeping. It's a unique moment of reflection for this weary story-teller. We have been going a mile a minute since our first daughter's birth in July, 2018, through last December 30th. Eighteen months, the birth of two daughters, new jobs, a relocation, and many steps in between. All that noise has made me forget the feeling of a slow-burn day. I may only get a twenty-minute slow-burn right now before one of the girls lets me know, it's back to business, Dad.
So I sit here and ponder the burden of care. The price we pay for all we've got. This will end, everything does, and it's always sad. Kobe Bryant's death at age 41 reminded the world that even millions of dollars could not insulate us from the fragile protection life is afforded from death. Ah, our mortality, a topic I'm all too familiar with, so familiar with it caused one girl to break my heart at a young age. Weaving lives together is a risky business with a high probability of heartbreak, emotional problems, and the difficulty of navigating the grieving process correctly. Many wonder why we even do it begin with.
Not this story-teller, though. I know the price of care and connecting with others. It's worth every penny, every tear when relationships are over, even the ones that do not work out. By my account, seven relationships shaped my ability to love before I met Anne. During these seven encounters, I had my heart broken or broke another's heart. There were tears, sleepless nights, and the question of why couldn't I find this elusive life-long love connection. All seven of these relationships taught me how to intimately care about another human being in a way I had not previously known. The benefit of those life experiences is Anne and my daughters' gain. I look back at all of them fondly, even the ugly ends, maybe mostly the ugly ends.
Being in the field of social work, I have met people who have done horrible acts. Once, (years ago) a friend was reading through a newspaper and said, look at this frightening story about this horrific young man being violent with a guard. It was a former client, and I mustered the words, I was sad for my previous client. What they did was wrong, and they deserved the consequence because violence is never the answer. What my friend did not understand is caring for this person. I learned the nuances of why this young person looked at the world the way they did. Their view was manipulated, perverted from ordinary, and wrong, but not because of anything they did. Their character was stolen from them before they could even walk.
Yes, the burden of caring for others is often sitting in a room full of people and being the only one to explain their awful choices. This is what opening up and weaving our lives together gives us. It gives us context, understanding, connection, and expansion; expansion into experiences we only know two-dimensionally. We know sexual assault is gruesome but we don't understand how horrifying until we hear it re-told by someone we love. It's only then that we can dismiss the stupid notion of asking the dumb question, "Well, what was she wearing; maybe she was asking for it?" The connection between us bridges wide gaps between people, it provides a safety net for when we fall and offers powerful bonds that change us at our core.
But it does end, and when those powerful connections do stop, we hurt, hurt as we have never hurt before. It's in those moments we are given one last gift from our friends, lovers, people we care for. We are not given a burden to carry but a chance to realize what we had and pour that heartfelt gift into the people we still have, to bring what made that bond between you and them, intense, unusual, long-lasting, or unique, to other people in your life. So yes, the price to pay for caring for so many will be high when it ends, and it will hurt, but it's not a burden. It's the currency we take into our next relationships. Whether it's through tears, smiles, hugs, laughter, or silent moments of sitting together, take that energy to pay it forward. It's what makes every relationship live on long after it has ended, and that's how we all can live forever.