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Caregivers as Hollow Bones
Second of three sample chapters from Midwives of the Spirit: Thoughts on Caregiving, copyright 2002 by Jane Mary Curran. All rights reserved.
I have a fountain on my patio. Beneath the water a small pump pulls water from the basin and pushes it up through tubing until it pours out and splashes onto rocks. As the water hits those rocks, it makes a gentle sweet sound.
Not long ago a windstorm blew through, tore leaves off trees, and deposited quite a few in the basin of the fountain. As the pump pulled the leaves in along with the water, the tube became so clogged with leaves that the water couldn’t flow. Slowly an oily film appeared on the surface of the water. Then dead bugs floated on the film. Finally mosquitos decided they’d discovered a user-friendly nursery. In short things became stuck. My sweetly flowing fountain became a stagnant backwater where unpleasant things found a home.
When compassion and physical fatigue set in, caregivers can become stuck like the water in my fountain. They may become stuck in boredom, sometimes in sadness, or in a spiritual heaviness. They become stuck when events and emotions come so thick and fast that the onslaught outweighs their ability to process and let feelings flow out.
And like the fountain when the flow of feelings becomes clogged with too much, too much, too much, and if the flow of emotions can’t move up and out, caregivers often become stuck and sick themselves. They may experience headaches, backaches, stomach problems, or even more serious illnesses. They become a backwater where unpleasant things find a home.
Throughout their days caregivers experience dozens of different moods, each filled with strong feelings of love, hope, fear, sorrow, and distress. And caregivers live in intimate contact with people whose illnesses produce their version of moods and strong feelings, many of them fearful, bitter, and angry. Together this mass of strong feelings eventually becomes tangled until it becomes almost impossible to separate the feelings of one person from the other.
In the intimacy of caregiving everyone begins to feel the whirlwind of emotions, and no one is particularly clear about who needs to take responsibility for which emotional experience. In the intimacy of caregiving there is always the potential for a tangle of feelings, especially when caregivers begin to believe that they can actually know and understand the feelings of those who are very sick or dying. Caregivers even begin to believe that they can take on or even be responsible for the emotional and spiritual feelings of the ones they love.
But no one has the capacity to provide space inside themselves beyond the space allowed for their own emotions. We humans do not have the inner capacity to live out the feelings of others. Each of us is a particular creation, and each is limited to one set of feelings. Our inner landscapes are not designed to accommodate two sets of emotions and two sets of experiences.
No one person can ever truly know or experience the feelings and emotional responses of another. In this process of walking with the dying it is essential to respect the very different experiences of everyone involved.
One of the great lessons of caregiving is to discern what emotional material belongs to the ones who are sick and what belongs to the caregivers. Because very sick people do not have the emotional, physical, and spiritual energies to separate feelings, caregivers can be of great help if they gently but firmly separate who is feeling what. This process of discernment, self awareness, and separation of emotional material requires caregivers to maintain as clean an emotional and spiritual body as possible, a daily challenge in the heat of work that often seems endless.
Native American tradition offers us an image that, like the fountain filled with debris, can help with this tangle of feelings and fears. The phrase Native Americans have for moments when the Spirit flows cleanly through our hearts and minds is that we have “hollow bones.” When we have “hollow bones,” the wind of Spirit can blow through bringing gifts of healing and hope.
Those who are looking into the face of their own mortality have bones that have grown clogged with strong feelings of fear, sorrow, sickness, and despair. They hold onto feelings that become stagnant and stale. There is no outlet.
When caregivers experience the feeling of hollow bones, they sense an inner spaciousness that helps in the management of feelings. With hollow bones, caregivers are continually letting go of feelings before these feelings impede the flow of Spirit. The additional blessing of hollow bones is that caregivers let flow not only some of their own sorrows but also some of the emotional and spiritual heaviness of those they care for.
No one can carry the emotional and spiritual burdens of another no matter how much love is involved. Caregivers can only walk along beside, offering presence and support. And keep their bones hollow so that grace and sacred compassion may flow freely into the lives of those they love.
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