Bibliotherapy* for Caregivers

When crisis hits, some folks pick up a book to escape; others read to delve deeper into whatever challenge confronts them. Being one of the latter group, I turned to Home by Marilynne Robinson last year when I was deep in the throes of caring for my father.

You probably read Gilead, Robinson’s poetic tale of a small-town minister who, grappling with death and aging, writes a last letter to his very young son. Home is the concurrent account of that minister’s best friend, who is ailing, and his children.

Both novels should be read simply because Robinson is a brilliant and thought-provoking writer. But as a caregiver, I found especially poignant her passages about the adult daughter who returns home to take care of her fragile father:

“Did she choose to be there, in that house, in Gilead? No, she certainly did not. Her father needed looking after, and she had to be somewhere, like every other human being on earth. What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be. All those years of work and nothing to show for it. But you make the best of things. People respect that. It is a blessing to know what is being asked of you.”

Writers connect us with characters, fictional or otherwise, who share our feelings, reduce our sense of isolation, calm our anxieties and guilt, teach us different methods of coping, guide us in understanding ourselves, and enlighten us about the people in our lives. Writers reveal a world to us we may know but not be able to express. To see your feelings in print validates them somehow.

You might as well start a reading list now about caregiving because if the subject hasn’t touched your life already, it will. Maybe you won’t be the caregiver, but someone you know—a friend, coworker, relative, employee—will be. And for the nonprofessional caregivers (the ones neither trained nor paid to give care), the all-consuming nature of those duties will impact every other aspect of their lives: work, friendships, hobbies, health. Even when the creature being cared for is a nonhuman. Rick Bass perfectly describes the strange parallel world caregivers inhabit in his essay “Sick Dog” (part of the anthology WOOF! Writers on Dogs):

“So it goes, in the caregiving mode. You have to get away; you have to get right back. For a long while, your time and even your emotions are not really your own; for a long time, it is you, at least as much as the patient, who is entrapped, held hostage.”

This is the plight of all nonprofessional caregivers. To walk an imaginary mile in their shoes, or to continue toward the finish line in your own, pick up a book.

* Bibliotherapy: the use of literature as a healing experience.

[The Sick Child by Edvard Munch; Sleeping by Georges Lemmen.]