MAiD Dispatches: Love in the Dark
It’s my favourite part of the day. My eyes dart right, then left, as if checking to see if anyone heard that thought surface in my brain.
Social conditioning tells me my favourite part of the day should be one of the rituals I share with my mom: Sitting beside her at meals, coordinating all the little things that make eating smoother, cleaner, and less hazardous. Standing at her closet in the evening after we’ve gotten her into her pajamas, pulling out combinations of tops and bottoms to choose her outfit for the next day. Spending the 15 minutes before her last round of meds at 9:30 in some sort of embrace.
(Her anxiety is high at night and one evening she kept tapping her shoulder as we waited for the nurse. When I finally asked her to type what she meant on the tablet, she wrote, “Hold me.” I realized that I spend so much of the day doing practical tasks that I was forgetting to be simply affectionate.)
But when I get into my car at the long-term care home at 9:45pm and make my way along the quiet roads to Riverside Drive, I find myself letting out a slow exhale as soon as I make the left turn onto the road that hugs the waterfront. As the car glides by houses illuminated for the holidays and the Detroit skyline comes into view, with its glittering lights sparkling against dark sky and dancing across the surface of the river, I sink into a sense of safety.
For the next 12 hours, I can soften. I walk in the door at my mom’s condo and start peeling off clothes as I walk down the hallway — the need to shed the day is urgent. I stand in fuzzy socks at the bathroom mirror and layer serums and creams on my face. In bed I jot down details from the day I don’t want to forget. And then I read a bit before surrendering to the darkness.
I’m reading Nick Cave’s revelatory Faith, Hope and Carnage for the third time this year. His extraordinary emotional capacity and his commanding grasp of life’s profound beauty being reliant on its profound perversity brings me deep comfort.
Love is what the holds this existence together. It’s actually quite easy to get the loving others part down. We’re usually not as great at loving ourselves. And that is what I realize this precious part of the night is for me: It’s not me loving my mom less. It’s simply me loving myself through this impossible journey.
“So you learn to make peace with the idea of death as best you can. Or rather you reconcile yourself to the acute jeopardy of life, and you do this by acknowledging the value in things, the precious nature of things, and savouring the time we have together in this world. You learn that the binding agent of the world is love.”
—Nick Cave, in Faith, Hope and Carnage
