Look at What You Did This Month | CarePrints

Today is the last day of September.

Somewhere, the World Alzheimer's Month campaigns are wrapping up. The purple lighting will come down over the next few days. The organizations that spent September raising awareness will move into fourth-quarter fundraising and holiday appeals. The people who work in dementia advocacy will exhale, and rest, and start planning next year.

You will get up tomorrow and it will still be your Tuesday.

That asymmetry is real, and we are not going to pretend it isn't. Awareness months are for the unaware. They come, they mark time, they go. What they mark for you is different — not the passing of a campaign, but the passing of another month of a job that has no end date.

Before it slips away entirely, we want to spend a few paragraphs on what actually happened this month at your house. Because it is a thing worth naming.

The quiet inventory

You did not track any of this. Nobody asked you to. You would not have thought to keep score, and you certainly did not think of it as an accomplishment.

But if you look back honestly at September, some version of this is what actually happened:

You administered somewhere in the range of ninety separate medication doses. Most of them on time. You cooked or arranged meals roughly ninety times. You made a hundred small decisions on someone else's behalf, quietly, without fanfare, most of them correctly.

You handled at least one appointment that was harder than it needed to be. You had at least one hard conversation with a family member. You noticed at least one small change that you have not yet decided whether to bring up with the doctor. You navigated one or two social occasions — a birthday, a family visit, a religious observance — where nobody knew what you spent the day managing.

You had at least one afternoon that came apart. You held it together in front of her anyway. You went to bed that night thinking you had done poorly, and got up the next morning and did it again.

You called nobody in crisis. You needed to call somebody in crisis at least once. You did not, because you got through it, which is different from being fine.

Nobody sent a thank-you card. Nobody sent a bonus. Nobody will note that September went the way it did. You will note it, and only in retrospect, when we point it out.

What this actually was

None of the above is remarkable, in the sense that other family caregivers are doing exactly the same work in exactly the same silence right now in kitchens all over the country.

It is also, plainly, remarkable. Both things are true.

The thing worth naming — the thing awareness months miss, because they are aimed at spectators — is that the work is real, cumulative, and consequential regardless of whether it is applauded. You made a month happen for another person who could not have made a month happen without you. That is a specific and rare thing to have done.

You do not need to feel proud of it. You do not need to feel anything about it. It is simply what happened, and it is worth having it said out loud once before September closes.

What comes next

Tomorrow is October. There is no theme. There is no campaign that will make October easier or harder than September was.

There will be one more transition — the clock change in early November — that will help the sundowning a little. There will be some cooler weather that may help her sleep. There will be a small handful of family holidays coming up that will need managing. There will be another ninety medication doses. Another hundred small decisions. Another fifteen minutes here and there, we hope, that belong to you.

The work does not change. The calendar does. That is the whole shape of caregiving over the long stretch.

One thing we would ask

If there is one small thing you did this month for yourself — a walk, a phone call, an evening with a novel, a Sunday morning that was quiet — please do it again in October. Not because you deserve it, though you do. Because doing it once is a version of remembering that you are still the person you were before this became your job, and October is going to need that person too.

That is what we would leave you with. That, and thanks for reading through the month with us.

We will see you tomorrow.

The CarePrints library sits behind an ordinary subscription. If you have been reading throughout September and have not yet tried the activities themselves, October is as good a month as any to. [Browse the library →]