Caregiving and Death

My husband, Jack, died with medical assistance on November 19, 2018.  He’d been diagnosed with cancer nearly three years earlier.  During his 2016 treatment and again when the cancer metastasized in 2018, I was his caregiver.  

I am not a born nurturer.  Jack wasn’t really the ideal sick person either.  During his illness, I read about other spouses’ caregiving experiences, trying to glean something to help.  Those books didn’t speak to me.  They were written by people who seemed more suited to the role.  Or they were written by people who cared for model patients.  Or those writers were not telling the whole truth.  

Reading them made me feel inadequate, not worthy of the encouragement and compliments  I received from people while I was a caregiver and since.   I felt I had to keep my frustrations and my bitchiness deeply hidden.  I was out of my depth, seemingly ill equipped.  

After Jack died, I decided to share my experience, hoping it would help others.  First, I told part of my story orally.  I was the post-lunch speaker at a meeting two weeks after Jack died.  Scheduled to speak about the impact of the legalization of cannabis on multi-residential housing, I realized over lunch people wanted to hear about medical assistance in death (MAID).  I decided to wing it - to share the story of Jack’s death in front of 100 people on about 30 minutes notice.  The room was rapt.  People found my account interesting, because MAID was so new, and the law so unclear to everyone.   

I left the meeting vowing to help people understand the choice afforded some Canadians to end life early.  I knew Jack would support my decision.  A month later, I wrote a three part series for rabble.ca about Jack’s illness running parallel to the development of the MAID law in Canada.  Again, a positive reception.  People were and are hungry to know more about this right.  I was thrilled when the series won a Canadian Online Publishing Award a year later.  

The award buoyed me, motivating me to write more, this time about the carer role.  With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve concluded good caregiving takes many forms and the management and entertaining skills I brought to the job were just as valuable as those of the more nurturing caregiver.  

Perhaps there is no right way to be a caregiver. And perhaps there is no wrong way.  That’s the message I hope people will take away from the book I’m writing.