Caring Anyway – a Column by Lindsay Kelly

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…