Last night, in my writing workshop group, the text we were discussing was an essay by writer Helen Schulman. It's called "My Father, the Garbage Head" and it's about the death of her father. He suffered from so many different physical conditions that she calls him a "neurological garbage head" and she writes about his care over the last decade of his life, after he had suffered so many strokes that he was almost completely incapacitated.

There's a lot of suppressed emotion in the piece and to be honest, the group didn't respond well to the writing or the character of the narrator that came through. I can see why - it's dark, and there are these little, hidden cries for help embedded throughout. I was impressed by some lines though, including these ones:

"All that tender loving filial care was supposed to help my father, but it didn't. It was supposed to build me into a better person, make me more compassionate, effective, stronger. I think that people like to believe there is a reward in the end for caregiving. There were no rewards. There was only my father's compelling need and my useless love for him."

Which is...bleak. To say the least. And I can't get on board with the idea that love is useless. But I do admire the writer's honesty in saying that caregiving doesn't always have the rewards that, in our most generous and hopeful moments, we might ascribe to it. It's like, great! Not only do you have to do the work of caregiving, but you have to be effective, strong and compassionate too? Can't you just be, you know, human? Tired and cranky sometimes? Suffering from a little compassion fatique?

Not that these are things to aspire to, just that, you know, they happen.