On Caregivers and the Internet.

Being a mom is not the only form of caretaking, but it’s the one that gets the most visibility on social media and offline. I have thoughts about this.

First, a little story.

Usually, I let my cat play outside our patio at 6 am while I get ready for work, then I bring him in one hour later before leaving the house. This morning, he surprised me by running into the kitchen with two bird wings coming out of his mouth.

He seemed proud of himself and was showing me his prey. I hadn’t even sipped my decaf yet, and when I saw what was going on, I ran to grab him, shake him a little to get him to open his mouth, and gladly the pigeon escaped my cat’s teeth and jumped away.

I felt terrible. Was this bird ok?

I put my cat inside the bathroom and went to check on the pigeon, who seemed to be in a state of shock. It jumped around when it saw me but couldn’t fly. I googled “my cat injured a bird” and “bird rescue.”

The pigeon seemed ok. No blood, both wings could move, but it seemed to be a little shocked. I left it water and some bread crumbs and closed the patio door so that it could heal in the shade, without my cat tormenting it.

Later, during my lunch break at work, I watched “how to rescue a pigeon” videos, and something about this one warmed my heart.

My dad loved birds and subscribed to bird magazines, even though we lived in NYC and mainly saw squirrels and subway rats. Something about the pigeon’s kind face, how silent it was, reminded me of how much I missed my father. I planned to try this pigeon rescue method as soon as I got back home in the afternoon.

For the first time in one year, I was worried, yet again, about another being’s suffering. I had to make it better. This feeling was all-encompassing, and what I did as a caretaker when my parents were alive. My job was to help them feel happy, comfortable, and if possible, to help lessen any bodily suffering caused by their illness. I failed at it a lot, but I tried. In this video, the pigeon makes it and flies away.

To watch the way nature works for or against life, a bird making it through with some help.

*

When I got back from teaching middle school in the afternoon, the pigeon was still there, cute, fluffy, immobile, on top of my patio table. I put my cat in the room for a few minutes so that he wouldn’t run out to get the poor pigeon, opened the patio door, and went to offer the bird some more water. Gladly, when it saw me, it was finally able to fly away and leave my patio.

Later in the evening, I saw through the window how two other pigeons were resting on the exact spot where the injured pigeon had been. I told my husband the dramatic story about our cat catching the bird when he returned from work. We both stared through our patio window at the two quiet pigeons, who, we both thought, were looking for their lost or injured friend or family member.

For the rest of the evening, I felt sad. Maybe a part of it is due to lack of sleep at night, middle school teacher exhaustion, or some existential anxiety. For the pigeon who got injured, for those two silent birds who were looking for their fluffy member, and a little for myself.

On Caretaking

Last year, I witnessed, comforted, and did my best to relieve my parent’s suffering at home. In the middle of a pandemic, mom was in her last days of breast cancer. Dad had a few months to live, having been diagnosed with goal bladder Cancer. They signed up for at-home hospice, which meant getting a few hours of help a few times a week and having access to a 24/7 “hotline” where you could call nurses in case of an emergency, who guided and told you what to do on the phone. A hospice doctor came to see them once a week. The rest was on my sister and me. The night shifts, administrating morphine if needed, feeding, helping them walk, singing to them, staying up at night to make sure they are ok, playing music and their favorite films, trying to make them as happy as possible as their bodies slowly prepared to leave the world.

Something about seeing that pigeon this morning reminded me of the fragility of life, of having to watch someone suffer and doing your best to relieve that suffering. Tonight I keep thinking about that, about the pigeon who hopefully is healed and flying around and about those who don’t always make it.

Suleika Jaouad wrote in her newsletter this week about the role of a caretaker,

“I have long believed that illness is hardest on a caregiver. Day in and day out, they witness things that seem unendurable, even unspeakable, and are powerless to stop them. The toll of caregiving is high, but as far as resources go, it’s often neglected entirely.”

I was always so focused on relieving my loved one’s pain, mostly failing at it, that I never thought about the other side. How watching someone suffer is also traumatic and challenging for a caregiver, for me.

I remember talking to hospice workers who have shared that, although they can confidently help take care of other people’s dying loved ones, it is a different story when it’s their own. They would feel paralyzed and full of too many emotions. They would do it, but the emotional consequences would be heavier. Working-class black women, brown women, women with thick English accents just like my mother’s. Some white women. I’ve only met female hospice workers and caretakers so far, and that is interesting in itself too, but not surprising.

While I get ready to be a mom in two months, I have conflicting feelings about the visibility some caretakers get versus others.

While mothers who take care of their children get platforms (offline and huge ones online) to vent, relate, complain, cry, and support each other in this journey (some can even monetize on social media), end-of-life caretakers get ignored. In general, those who help the sick, the elderly, the dying don’t get to talk about it much outside of the intimate caregiving space.

End-of-life caregiving. It’s not pretty. It’s not worth a TikTok dance, it’s not very cute, and it’s hard. Just like being a mom is, but without the “it’s also bliss” part — a mixture of exhaustion with the grand finale of our mortality staring at us in the face. Plus, in my experience, most people want to leave the room as soon as one mentions anything death, so it goes.

Jessica Urlichs, whom I follow for the mommy posts and cute illustrations has 186k followers on Instagram. Her posts are about how motherhood is “both hard and also beautiful” and get around 5k likes from other moms who can relate. I still can’t relate.

*

To this, I’ve been following grief and death-doula accounts on Instagram that gained bigger followings during the pandemic, when more and more people in their isolation went online to share their experiences of loss. I will be thinking and writing more about how these accounts function. On platforms where the main mediums are images and videos, and there is a specific aesthetic expected to be performed online, how does one share about subjects that hard and not even beautiful?

I am happy to have so many amazing mothers and friends I can talk to about pregnancy and parenting with. At the same time, I also wish talking about other forms of caretaking wasn’t so taboo. I still want to connect to more Millennials who have been primary caretakers of loved ones with illness, or end-of-life caretakers. Even when it feels like nobody wants to hear about it, I do. That’s one reason I started this newsletter, to find a platform to write about grief and how it intersects with other dimensions of our online and offline lives.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CX4odqWsryK/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

[I couldn’t embedd this image, but here is the link]

Jess, The Death Empath on Instagram, asks us to focus on our friends who are grieving. She has around 32k followers and shares posts about death and grief: It’s hard. It’s not beautiful, and I can relate.

The things we lost in the Pandemic

While everyone seems to love babies and wants to come help me take care of my daughter when she is born (which I am so very grateful for, now that I don’t have parents), I cannot help but feel some grief about last year. How, as my parents were dying, aside from my husband helping out and my sisters covering shifts, it all felt like a ghost town. We had to organize two memorials on Zoom, to add to the pandemic loneliness.

I know I am not alone. This Twitter thread, written by a mom who gave birth in the middle of the pandemic, also expresses feelings I can relate to. The missing out, the feeling like our loved ones deserved better.

In two weeks, I get to see some of my best friends in person, who are now moms and live in Charlotte, NC. It will be my first baby shower. A celebration of life. Another portal. I know this is a privilege that others did not have last year when they were pregnant during COVID. Other new moms are reaching out to me to offer help, advice, and support makes me so happy. I get to reach out to them too.

At work, my teacher colleagues ask me, as a pregnant person, “how are you feeling?” they come up to me and want to share their own experiences as moms and dads.

Now that social distancing and mask restrictions are over, the sense of community that I never had when my parents died feels wonderful. Yet again, a part of me wants to ask, “but what about our experiences with loss?” Can they get more visibility too?

I guess the point of this letter is to say, we all missed out on so much this past two years. We all are a little injured. Some caretakers do get more presence and visibility than others and let’s remember that. Still, so many of us are grieving losses or lost experiences that we don’t get back. From one orphan to another. I think of the fluffy bird on my patio today who made it and after some shock, was able to fly again.

(And I better not let my cat out anymore unless he is wearing a collar with a bell, which he is now. )

PS: This was written fast and had a lot of unfinished thoughts. Sorry for any grammatical issues or typos. I would love to hear your own thoughts on motherhood, the internet, birth, death, and caretaking. Please subscribe to my newsletter here for more thoughts about Liminal Spaces.

Thanks for reading!