Bob Marcotte: The Caregiver’s Inch

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”

~ Ambrose Redmoon

I was the primary caregiver to my wife, Carole, during her cancer journey for 1,224 days. It was tough, and it eventually became brutal. Hard days stretched into harder weeks.

Bad news just became news after a while. She suffered with so much grace that I never considered giving up, but it was exhausting. I can honestly say that caregiving pummeled me to within an inch of my life so often that something remarkablehappened, I began to appreciate how big that inch was.

With it, I was able to keep going. I endured so much more than I ever imagined, and it taught me one very important lesson: you don’t have to be strong every minute; you just have to be strong this minute. With that mindset, you can put one foot in front of the other and make a difference for a long time.

Another thought eventually burned its way through the haze of my fatigue; all of this was a privilege. Of all people on planet earth, I was the one she asked for when she was in pain. She trusted me to tell her the truth. She confided her soul to me. And I was the only one who could make her laugh while she struggled to walk or during some of the other far more intimate and humiliating things that cancer forced her to endure.

Somehow, squeezing my hand made it better, and I am clueless as to how I inherited this ability, but it was real, and she could feel it.

Privilege.

It’s a hard word to accept when you’ve put in too many 22-hour days in a row and it costs you your job, or stayed awake with her for 35 hours in the emergency room while they tried to find her a bed.

It’s not all about lost sleep, you’re routinely asked to do the impossible. You’re supposed to stop pain, make her comfortable, give her hope, and sometimes move mountains.

A few months before she died, she told me she had a toothache. Hospice could not help us because it was not cancer related; I was on my own. Eventually, I found a remarkable man — Dr. K.O. Crosby — a dentist willing to make a house call during his lunch hour. He and his assistant loaded up the trunk of his car with all kinds of equipment and drove to her. I “assisted” where I could, but mostly I watched as my wife had two infected teeth extracted while lying in a hospital bed in our front room.

I promise you, it was something I hope never to witness again. After it was over, I fetched her pain pills, the ones that made her sleepy, and just as she was nodding out she thanked me. She told me that no one in the world could get a dentist to her bedside except me. While she slept, I sat on the couch next to her for over an hour hugging myself tightly and shaking uncontrollably from what I’d seen.

A few weeks later, we found Dr. Jeffrey Krohn, an optometrist willing to come to our home. My wife lost sight in her left eye during her massive cancer surgeries and her eyeglass prescription could not keep up with the declining vision in her right. Not only did he evaluate her sight, he did so sensitively without ever mentioning her left eye. And in spite of him not charging us for the visit and providing her glasses at cost, my wife told me I was her hero, and that no one else in the world could take care of her like I did.

Hero, another tough word to swallow. I thought of myself as weak, a caregiving failure; I was just making this stuff up as I went along, but to her I was a hero.

This is precisely where the Caregiver’s Inch resides. Months after she passed I came to the realization that what I did wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. Her comfort and dignity were of such importance to me that I gave my life to protect them.

Heroes get medals, superheroes wear capes; I got neither, but she died knowing that she was forever loved as completely as humanly possible.

And that is the Caregiver’s Reward.

This story was originally published July 10, 2015 at 7:33 AM with the headline "Bob Marcotte: The Caregiver’s Inch."