He told me some of it on the phone, Thursday evening. More of it came out in the days after he returned. He’d handled the dinners, navigated Elaine’s anxiety about the unfamiliar restaurant, redirected when she started the particular spiral of grief-talking that can consume an evening if you don’t catch it early. He’d made the decisions about activities and pace and when to suggest a rest. He had, in short, done the work of being the person responsible for Elaine’s emotional landscape, and he’d done it without me.
The realization wasn’t that he was incapable. He is entirely capable. The realization, as he described it, was the weight of it. Four days of it. Constant low-frequency attention management, the monitoring of her emotional state, the calibration of responses to keep things from becoming difficult. Four days.
“I keep thinking,” he said, on the Saturday after he got back, “about the fact that you’ve been doing that for years. And I just sort of — let you. Without asking whether it was okay. Without asking if you needed to put it down.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. There was something I was feeling that I didn’t want to contaminate with the wrong words.
“I’m glad it was useful,” I said finally.
“That’s a very you thing to say.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. Useful. You reframe everything as whether it serves a purpose.” He said it without criticism, more like an observation he was just making for the first time. “I do that too, actually. I reframe everything as whether it’s the right thing to do for the people I love.”