What It Takes to Show Up
A meeting about what gets spent in caregiving that no one sees — the energy of a thousand small decisions, the effort of holding yourself together for someone who can't know how hard it is, and the quiet cost of extending grace to people who say the wrong thing.
Opening Reflections
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that caregivers describe, one that doesn’t come from lifting or driving or managing appointments — though those things are real too. It comes from the accumulation of everything else. The small decisions that never stop. The composure that has to be assembled every time you walk through a door. The grace extended, again and again, to people who say something careless and don’t know it.
This week the group sat with all of that.
Not to solve it. Not to reframe it into something more manageable. But to name it clearly and let it be as heavy as it actually is.
There is something important that happens in a room — even a Zoom room — when a caregiver says something that is true and others recognize it. When the experience stops being isolated and becomes shared. That recognition doesn’t remove the weight. But it changes how alone you are when you carry it.
Topics Discussed
A Thousand Small Decisions
Decision fatigue in caregiving isn't just tiredness — it's the accumulated weight of endless micro-decisions that leaves no room for the ones that actually matter. And underneath each one, often, is a reminder of loss.
4 min readThe Face We Show
Many caregivers are 'on' — composed, present, holding it together — when they are with the person they care for. The falling apart happens later, alone. This is not deception. It's one of the quieter costs of loving someone through loss.
3 min readWhen Words Miss the Mark
People say hurtful things to caregivers — and to those who've lost someone — not out of malice but out of not knowing what to say. The burden of absorbing those words, and then extending grace to the person who said them, often falls on the caregiver.
3 min readIn Closing
Three things came up this week that, taken together, describe something real about what caregiving asks of a person:
It asks you to decide, constantly, about everything — and it asks this even when your brain has run out of deciding.
It asks you to show up, composed and present, for the person you love — even when what you feel most is grief at who they were.
And it asks you to receive careless words with grace — and then, somehow, find enough left over to care for the person who said them.
None of that is small. And none of it is visible to the people who aren’t in this particular kind of life.
What this group offers is a place where it doesn’t need to be hidden. Where the cost of showing up can be named aloud without shrinking it or fixing it. Where you don’t have to perform okayness — or perform the opposite — you can just be here as you are.
We closed in gratitude, as always.
For the honesty. For the recognition. For showing up.
With care, Meg & Candice