Carrying What Cannot Be Fixed
When caregiving becomes a daily walk with grief.
1. Before
Caregiving doesn’t begin at death. It begins in the long seasons of decline, when the weight of daily life shifts onto one set of shoulders.
I have walked with caregivers whose lives have been consumed by this path:
A wife caring for her husband after a catastrophic motorcycle accident, navigating his brain injury, limb loss, and emotional instability.
A 91-year-old husband caring for his wife with dementia, slowly watching her slip away piece by piece.
Though their circumstances differ, the essence is the same: unrelenting responsibility, daily grief, and the slow wearing down of the caregiver’s own body and spirit.
2. The Work
The work has been less about “fixing” and more about holding:
Grief Naming: Acknowledging the sorrow of watching someone you love change or diminish. Also how much your own life changes when your plans and dreams collapse after an accident or life changing diagnosis.
Witnessing the Toll: The panic attacks, the high blood pressure, the exhaustion, the endless blow-by-blow that reveals how heavy the load has become.
Family Dynamics: The sorrow of absent support, fractured systems, and the way caregiving exposes old wounds.
Endurance as Devotion: Walking with them in the truth that caregiving is its own form of sadhana — one that requires not just strength, but surrender.
3. The Turning Points
There are no quick breakthroughs here. Instead:
Small relief when even a little support arrives.
Softening when grief is spoken aloud instead of carried in silence.
Glimpses of presence when the caregiver allows themselves to be human, not heroic.
Breaking patterns that are draining and even abusive born out of frustration with a life that is no longer recognizable.
The turning point is not resolution but recognition: naming what is true becomes medicine.
4. The Aftermath
The decline continues. The load continues. The caregiver’s body grows more fragile, the grief deeper. And yet they keep showing up — because love, duty, and devotion leave no other choice. There have been wins of all sizes. for the motorcycle accident client due to the perseverance of his wife in keeping him in therapy of all kinds and his determination to do things they were told he would never do.
This is not closure. It is endurance.
5. The Reflection
This journey shows that grief begins long before the final breath. Every refusal of food, every memory lost, every inability regained is its own initiation. Caregiving is devotion, but it is also depletion — and without support, the caregiver themselves becomes another patient.
And yet, within this, there is holiness. To stay, to tend, to witness, to keep carrying what cannot be fixed is a spiritual path all its own. Caregiving is grief work, and grief work is sacred work.
CTA
If you are walking the path of caregiving, you do not have to carry it in silence. This work offers space to lay down what’s heavy, to be witnessed, and to find steadiness in yourself even as you hold another.
👉 Begin your journey here