The Deep

Have you ever left the sand and been so far in the deep that the water feels cold at your feet. Your journey from the shore has found you in a distant place but there is no space for fear because you are breathing for someone else. While you linger on the surface with breath in your ears, his fingertips are touching yours and he’s whispering, I’m here.

This is how it feels to be carer for someone who is the light of your world, someone you have loved so deeply for so long that you would do anything, everything, to make sure they feel loved. Bathing and feeding and dressing wounds and medications and hoisting and catheters and holding vomit bags and sleeping with one eye open so you are there when he calls your name in the night. You still wake on the alarm and go to work because there is no choice but for you to keep the wheels turning on two worlds that must run parallel like train tracks. Even though you know that in time, someone will crash but it won’t be you because you must keep going, keep working, keep loving. There is a mortgage and food and electricity and rates and water and fuel and medications that don’t stop. You’re allowed a carer three hours a day, but the government knock back everything that might have kept you home, everything that might have given you hope. Insurance on old super lapsed but you didn’t even know what that would mean and new super has no insurance. There is nothing.

But you do it. You do it all, every minute of every hour of every day, in a heartbeat, just to hear him say, good night, I love you.

When you’re in the deep and your head is below the surface, you can’t hear anything but the breath you breathe for him. Until his love spears light through the deep, from another place, another parallel.

Lumen de lumine. Light from Heaven.