by Jane Heller
Humor is especially important for caregivers; we need to laugh or we’ll explode. For me, it’s all about comedy—from Some Like It Hot to Bridesmaids, from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld, from Nora Ephron to Tina Fey.
It’s virtually impossible to hold two thoughts in our head at the same time, so if we replace our sad/anxious/woe-is-me thoughts with funny, lighthearted ones, we’re in business.
“A movie or a sitcom is the way to go for caregivers,” said health coach Nancy Kalish. “Even if you don’t think it’ll be funny, watch it anyway because it’s still better than not watching. A little bit of humorous distraction really does help.”
Best of all, though, are the humorous moments that aren’t fiction—the ones we witness in the course of caring for a loved one. It’s a gift to be able to turn even the dark times into those that provide laughs, and we all have it in us.
I asked some of the members of our roundtable if they’d ever found humor in their travails, and the answer was a resounding yes.
Yudi Bennett: “At one point Noah was mad at me and he slammed the door, wrote a note, put it on the door, and told me I was never to talk to him for the rest of his life. Another parent would have been upset, but I was so happy. First of all he wrote a note, spelled everything right, and it was grammatically correct. And then there was the fact that he expressed his feelings. This was a kid who was nonverbal! Another time Noah told me, ‘Get a life, Mom.’ He used to talk in this very stilted way, like an Israeli who didn’t speak English. Now he was using slang! I celebrate those moments even though some other parent would have said, ‘Apologize’ or ‘Don’t be fresh.’ I thought, what an accomplishment.”
Barbara Blank: “My father was walking the other day and my husband went to hold his hand because there was a curb. My father said to him, ‘Don’t get close to me. People will think that we’re gay.’ We had a good laugh about that one.”
Harriet Brown: “After Kitty’s first day back at school, she came home with some friends and I was making them milkshakes and she made a joke: ‘Yeah, we know all the ice creams that have the most calories. Ha-ha.’ I thought it was funny and she thought it was funny and no one else thought it was funny. And then much, much later, we had an experience, again with ice cream, in front of the ice cream freezer at the store, looking for the ice creams with the most calories and realizing that everyone was staring at us in a horrified, disapproving way. We found that hysterical. It so epitomizes what you have to do with this illness and how it goes against the mainstream idea of eating.”
Linda Dano: “We would laugh because my mother would say the damnedest things like, ‘Why didn’t you bring the little boy here?’ I’d say, ‘Well, he was sleeping.’ She’d say, ‘The one in the closet?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, that’s the one.’ My husband, Frank, would get crazy and try to get her to remember things correctly, but I kept saying, ‘Make her happy. If she thinks there’s a little boy floating around, who cares?’ And I found humor all the time with Frank. I was convinced that he shouldn’t look like a skinny, gray cancer patient, so I kept feeding him and myself, and we got fatter and fatter and fatter. When he died and I put him in a casket before I cremated him, I had to have the funeral director cut the back of his Armani suit because he was too frigging fat to fit in it.”
Jennifer DuBois: “My mom eventually needed a walker to get around. That was a tough time because it really demonstrated how much she was losing the fight—the cancer and chemo and radiation were taking their toll. So we got her a walker from hospice, and she and my dad immediately dubbed it ‘Johnny,’ as in Johnny Walker. Whenever we would go somewhere, she would say: ‘Don’t forget to bring Johnny with us.’ Or ‘Where’s Johnny?’ It was obviously her way—and ours—of coping with the fact that she now needed to use a walker without her having to say, ‘I need my walker.’ ”
John Goodman: “The things that my wife said in the hospital made us laugh. She would look at our son-in-law, who was a little overweight, and say, ‘You’re a big fat pig.’ Or she’d look at our daughters and say, ‘You’re so ugly.’ We knew it wasn’t her. It was just something in her body making her physically and mentally crazy.”
Judy Hartnett: “One example is when I took Paul to the doctor’s office for a checkup. He’s terrified of being cold, so he had a blanket around him from his legs to his waist and a large sweatshirt with a hood that went over his glasses, and all you could see was his mouth. We went to sign in at the reception desk and I wrote: ‘Judy Hartnett and E.T.’ The receptionist saved it and it’s still hanging on their wall.”
Jeanne Phillips: “My mother and I would go to the restroom together when we were in restaurants—two girls going to powder our noses—but it became essential that I go with her when she got Alzheimer’s. I remember one night we were at a restaurant in West Hollywood. We had gone to the restroom and on the way back to our table she walked ahead of me. There were five or six men sitting at the bar. As we passed, she looked over at them and said loudly, ‘Oh, what good-looking men.’ Their heads swiveled toward us. None of them was over forty-five, and when they saw who had said it, they didn’t know how to react because Mom was in her eighties. I quickened my pace and I announced to them, ‘You know, my mother always did have a great eye for good-looking men.’ At which point she turned to me and said loudly, ‘Don’t say I’m your mother. Tell them I’m your sister.’ She was a pistol.”
Suzanne Preisler: “My mother was doing pretty well after starting chemo, but at one point she had bladder problems and had to have those pads on the bed. I should mention that she was the kind of person who would not use a cane or a walker and did not want anybody to know there was anything wrong. So we went to Walmart. My mother sat in the prescription department with everybody else and I went to the counter and said to some kid, ‘Where do you have the pads?’ He said, ‘I don’t know what you mean’ and yelled out, ‘Sandy? Can you help this lady with some pads?’ Sandy said, ‘You don’t mean the underpants?’ I said, ‘No, I mean the pads.’ She said, ‘I don’t know if we have the pads,’ and yelled, ‘Lucy? This lady over here in the blue sweater needs the pee pads.’ Finally Lucy came back with these little pads. I said, ‘I’m not housebreaking a puppy here.’ My mother started to laugh. And then she began to tell everybody in Walmart, ‘My daughter—she’s always been like that.’ It was like a comedy routine.
“Also, when my sister was in the hospital, she was supposed to have their chicken broth, which was full of salt. There was a chicken place nearby that has the best chicken soup. My husband, Jerome, was coming to meet me at the hospital, so I said to him, ‘Do you have your briefcase with you?’ He said yes. I said, ‘Go get some chicken soup, put it in your briefcase, and bring it.’ He snuck it into the hospital, and we got my sister to eat it. Sometimes when you have those surgeries, they do not let you go home unless you pass gas. I said to her, ‘Eat this soup. It’ll help you pass gas.’ She wolfed down the soup, and Jerome kept sneaking it in there. Sure enough it worked. When she finally passed gas, we were jumping up and down and high-fiving.”
Karen Prince: “Andy couldn’t talk, but he would try to explain things to me as best he could by drawing or using pictures. If I still couldn’t get it, rather than get frustrated, he would just throw up his hands, and we’d laugh and forget about it. Laughing is important. Don’t push, just laugh, and think of a different way to try later.”
April Rudin: “One time my sister took our grandmother shopping at T.J. Maxx and my grandmother went to the bathroom. My sister started looking through the racks and forgot about my grandmother. She searched the store and couldn’t find her. It turned out my grandmother was locked in a stall and finally crawled out from underneath. She may have had Alzheimer’s, but she was resourceful, and she always made us laugh.”
Harold Schwartz: “When my wife got Parkinson’s, I had to cook for her—even though I know as much about cooking as you know about flying a shuttle to the moon. If you can’t microwave it, I don’t eat it. One time
she said, ‘I’d like to have fish sticks.’ I went shopping and bought frozen fish sticks and put them in the freezer. The night she wanted them I went to the freezer and took out the fish sticks and saw they were not microwavable. I threw them back into the freezer and said, ‘What else do you want?’ Also, my wife had to write out instructions for how to use the dishwasher and the washer and dryer, because I’d never done it. She once told me she needed a new lint trap for the dryer. I didn’t even know what a lint trap was. And, of course, my son Joseph had an incredible sense of humor. He drank Ensure through the feeding tube, and I’d say, ‘What flavor do you like?’ and we’d kid around about it.”
John Shore: “My dad and I went to CVS to exchange his Depends for a smaller size and buy some denture cream. He was shuffling around with his cane, and I couldn’t believe this was the same man that used to blow college basketball kids off the court. As soon as we were out the door of the drug store, he started complaining that there was something wrong with the receipt, and all the people were idiots trying to rip him off. He stood right in front of those double doors fumbling around with the receipt and his cane and his glasses, and a crowd started to form because he was blocking the entrance. Inside I was cracking up. I think you have to look for the absurdity of the moment because it’s all we have sometimes.”
So, yes, laughter is possible even when the situation is bleak. But can you ever laugh too hard? Michael did.
He was in his hospital room recovering from surgery and decided to distract himself from the pain in his belly by turning on the TV. He found a channel that was showing an old Laurel and Hardy movie and he settled in. He started laughing and couldn’t stop, and the laughter was absolutely killing his newly repaired abdomen. He had to turn off the TV or he’d pass out. Unfortunately, the TV remote had slipped out of his hand and was now dangling between the bars of the bed, out of his reach. He couldn’t call the nurse, since the call button was also on the remote. He was stuck trying not to laugh until an aide finally came and rescued him.
What did I do when he told me that story? I laughed, naturally.
CHAPTER 20
Just Breathe. Or Meditate. Or Both.
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“Meditation becomes like a best friend to you. It’s a sanctuary, a place you can go to and be peaceful.”
—DEB SHAPIRO, meditation teacher and author
“Where are you going?” I asked Michael one evening a few years ago. He was standing in front of the bathroom mirror trimming his beard so it wouldn’t look like an out-of-control Brillo pad—an act he performs whenever he’s about to engage with anybody other than me.
“A meditation class,” he said. “Everybody tells me it would be healthy for me.”
“Everybody tells me the same thing,” I said, “but I’m just no good at it. I try to ‘still my mind’ or however they put it, and instead I obsess about all the things I should be doing instead of sitting there thinking about nothing.”
“I really want to learn,” he said, as his clipping scissors sent wiry little gray hairs into the sink.
“Good luck,” I said. “At least you’ll be well groomed.”
A few hours later he came home all excited—as radiant and dewy-eyed as a new bride.
“How’d it go?” I asked. “Were there a lot of men with ponytails?”
He nodded. “Women too. And they burned incense. It was really cool.”
He handed me a piece of paper with a lot of octagonal shapes on it and explained that while he sat cross-legged on the floor and listened to music in which there were chimes and chants, he was told to focus his mind on the shapes.
“And it worked?” I said.
“It did,” he said. “I kind of went into a trance and it was very relaxing.”
“I’m jealous,” I said. “I’ll go with you next time.”
There was no “next time.” Michael tried to practice his new meditation techniques at home and couldn’t recapture the magic of that first lesson. He decided it was all nonsense and gave it up.
Then came 2010 and his four hospitalizations. I’m not sure I took a real breath during that entire year. Well, of course I did. I must have. But I was constantly reacting to crises or trying not to react to crises, running from one task to another, functioning without stopping, gasping for air. I knew I should sit and breathe in that way people who meditate always tell you to, but I didn’t—partly because I didn’t know the “right” way to breathe. Was my mouth supposed to be open when I inhaled and closed when I exhaled? Or was it the other way around? Was it the lungs that filled up with air or the diaphragm? And what about thoughts while I breathed: Should I have any? Was it possible not to have any? It all seemed too complicated, and the last thing I needed was complicated.
I wished for the hundredth time that I knew how to meditate, since I kept hearing how much calmer I’d feel if I did. Wasn’t it the key to happiness for Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Love? If she could do it, why couldn’t I?
I sat on the floor one night and tried. I closed my eyes, took breaths, and said the word “peace” over and over. The good news is that I didn’t hyperventilate. The bad news is that my mind quickly veered off from “peace” to “I forgot to empty the dishwasher” and “The air conditioning guy is coming at three thirty tomorrow afternoon” and “Would I have a crush on Justin Bieber if I were a teenage girl?”
I got up and felt like a failure.
Months later I started writing this book and vowed to consult experts on the subject of meditation, especially after two of the members of our caregiver roundtable endorsed it.
Victor Garber: “My sister and I were driving in LA one day and she said, ‘I’m really worried about you.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘You’re so angry.’ I didn’t realize it until she said it, but I was angry at my mother’s disease and what was happening to her, and I was not able to express it. She noticed it because when I was driving, I would get furious in the car in a way that was completely irrational. So I studied Transcendental Meditation and it helped. I recommend it highly. Take fifteen minutes a day and just allow yourself to breathe. It does have a cumulative effect, so I was able to go through the day with less stress and anger.”
Michael Lindenmayer: “I meditate in the beginning of the morning, because I don’t want to carry any garbage into my day. There are a million different permutations of meditation, but the most basic is to sit down for twenty minutes, breathe, and clear your mind. If you can’t take twenty minutes, you should be looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, ‘What is keeping my brain so busy that I can’t even do that?’ ”
One of the permutations, I’ve learned, is what’s called “mindfulness meditation,” and clinical psychologist Michael Seabaugh is an advocate.
“Mindfulness-based psychotherapy is very big now,” he said. “It’s really about being in the present—being aware of what’s going on and pulling your mind back to it. When your mind goes to ‘I wonder if my husband’s okay right now,’ you notice the thought and then you consciously release it. You can even say, ‘Release,’ where you have a mental image of putting the thought on a boat and sending it down a river. And then you bring your mind back to the breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Notice the thought. Release it. Go back to the breath.”
Michael Seabaugh goes one step further by suggesting that we not only notice the thoughts that intrude on our state of calm but label them.
“Labeling the thoughts keeps them from running wild,” he said. “So just go ‘Worried thought.’ ‘Depressed thought.’ ‘Sad thought.’ ‘List-making thought.’ ‘Catastrophic thought.’ Notice the thought, label it, release it, and come back to the breath.”
Easiest of all, he believes, is the walking meditation where we go outside for a stroll and dedicate ourselves to being in the moment and noticing what’s in front of us.
“Most of the time we’re walking and thinking, I have to do this or I’m worried about that or I’ve
got to pay that bill,” he said. “Instead, walk and think about that tree, the sound of the birds, the feeling of the sun on your face, the cars going by. It’s really kind of amazing when you do it. You can walk down your block and see things you’ve never even seen before. Invariably, your mind will go to the worry, to what you need to get done, to what’s happening with your husband. So you just notice the thought, label it, release it, and come back to ‘tree,’ ‘flowers,’ ‘pink.’ Try it.”
I did try it. I took my afternoon walk along my usual route and noticed a cute gray-shingled cottage I’d never seen before, purple bougainvillea climbing over the fence of a neighbor, a car with a nearly flat tire, the way the breeze was playing with the ends of my hair. I also noticed that I needed new walking shoes and started thinking about where I’d buy them and how much traffic I’d encounter on my way to buying them and whether I’d find a pair in my size, given that my left foot’s a little bigger than my right foot, not to mention when I’d have a chance to buy them with Michael having just been treated at the ER for yet another infection. When I realized my mind was running away with the worries, I labeled them “worrying about shoes thoughts,” refocused on my breathing, and settled down.
Another permutation is the one set forth by Martin Boroson in his book One-Moment Meditation: Stillness for People on the Go. What caregiver wouldn’t be attracted to the idea of meditating for just a moment, right? Or is it for just a minute? And is there a difference?
“A minute is a unit of time that we think we can measure,” Martin told me. “We can find it on a clock. We can set a timer to do a minute. A moment is actually not a unit of time. It comes from a Latin word that means a particle sufficient to turn the scale. To translate that into modern language, we can think of a moment as something that seems very small and insignificant but that changes everything. Which is why the word ‘moment’ gives us the word ‘momentous’—because life can change in a moment. It has this kind of mystical suggestion to it in terms of energy and potential and drama that ‘minute’ just doesn’t have at all.”