Caring Anyway – a Column by Lindsay Kelly

There is a belief I run into again and again as a caregiver, and it usually arrives dressed as sympathy. It goes something like this: Don’t lose sight of who the real victim is. The person with the disease didn’t ask for it, their life is the one that was…

There is a role no one warns you about when you become a caregiver. You become the place where everyone else sets down their pain. When my husband, Rhead, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), I expected the practical work of appointments, medications, and endless logistics. What…

Recently, after I shared some of the harder parts of caring for my husband, Rhead, a stranger left a comment on a recent column implying that I was simply monetizing his multiple sclerosis (MS) — that by telling my story publicly, I was profiting off his illness. I…

I used to think the disease itself would be the hardest thing I’d face as a caregiver. I was wrong. Some days, the heaviest weight isn’t my husband’s illness at all. It’s the people around us who refuse to believe it’s real. My husband, Rhead, was diagnosed with progressive…

Not long ago, I listened to a therapist who works closely with caregiver spouses say something that stopped me cold. Whether the person who is diagnosed means to or not, she explained, the spouse caring for them can sometimes end up in a relationship that has become emotionally abusive. She…

They say drowning is quieter than people expect. It rarely looks like the thrashing and shouting we picture from movies. More often it is silent, and the people standing right there don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late. Lately, I’ve come to understand that caregiving can feel the same…

Even with my husband, Rhead, living in an assisted-living facility, there are so many hard days when I become somewhat of a punching bag. One visit, he is light and funny, the version of him I fell in love with, and the next, he can turn sharp and far away,…

The first night after my husband, Rhead, moved into an assisted living facility, I stood in our kitchen and listened to how quiet the house was. Our six kids were asleep, the dog was asleep, and I was alone with a silence I hadn’t heard in years and didn’t know…

For years after my husband, Rhead, was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis in 2019, I was working two full-time jobs, raising our six children, and caregiving for him around the clock. I kept telling myself I was managing, because the alternative was unthinkable. I had to be managing. Someone…

I don’t remember much about the support group meeting that changed everything. I don’t remember the facilitator’s name, the other people’s faces, how long we sat there, or what anyone actually said. What I remember is the moment, somewhere in the middle of someone else’s story, when I looked around…

I had never known anyone personally who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Walking my husband, Rhead, through those doors was one of the strangest moments of my life — not strange in a dramatic way, but strange in the quiet, disorienting way of realizing your life has become…

I was outside with my youngest child, who was only a few months old, strapped to my back while doing yard work, housework, and everything else, while my husband, Rhead, lay on the couch inside. This had been going on for a couple of years by then. Slowly, without a…