Recently I went back to Greece, to a place that I loved five years ago. I had not thought about what it would be like, to be back in a place I loved when I was a different person, in a different life. I had expected just to love it still, which I did, and yet I am different now; my job, my responsibilities, my body and face, my thoughts and experience and self. Five years ago I was not a carer, not in the way I have been since then. Even that, as my mum has needed me more, then, as her Alzheimer’s progressed and she moved into a home, needed me differently, is an ever shifting thing. And all this is how it should be, because I do not want a life that stays still; what value, what learning, what experience is there in that?
I hesitated to write about caring, but last week was carer’s week. I watched this conversation between
and and thought that perhaps, through my caring has always been part-time, making me question my right to that title, perhaps it matters to talk about this hidden work, this deep care, in all the myriad ways it can manifest.Two things, many things even, can be true at the same time. I can value the change and grieve it and it can still be strange, being in a place so solid in a memory, the place almost the same, yet being changed. The place is not really the same, of course; it is the luxury of distance, of knowing a place on a level which, however joyful, can only ever skim the surface. This is what allows it to seem the same, perhaps in the same way you could look at me and see the same person on the surface.
Five years ago I worked in a house by the sea. Five years ago I snuck out on my lunch break and swam between the crescent beds of sea grass that mark the water indigo from above, nail marks in the turquoise. The water was shallow then, impossible to swim straight away. I waded out, finally took the plunge with the water only up to my knees. I moved through the clear, through the warm. I looked back at the house on the edge above me. I looked back at a building and I saw a job I was scared of but happened to love, a job it turned out I could do, even though I had never been sure. I saw my family, away on a holiday of their own, the last one abroad, one I missed because I was working, here, in this most beautiful, most forgiving, most enlivening of places. I may have seen fish in the water; it would have been strange had I not, as they are everywhere here, tiny darts of silver and white waving flesh, but I don’t remember that. I don’t remember what was beneath. I remember the water and the shallowness and the warmth, and I remember lying back, looking back, looking up.
This time, the water is still shallow. I approach not from the house itself, fixed up now, fancier, but from the narrow strip of pebbly beach that at one end meets the dual carriageway. I walk along, past only a handful of people, and I tuck myself back, in the shade against the house’s boundary wall, beneath an overhanging bush. There is an old log, a twist of driftwood, in the water, one on the land too, sculptural and swirling. I hobble past both, rocks awkward underfoot, and the water is still just as low, just as warm. I can see the fingernail crescents of weed. I don’t go far before I snap my goggles on, bend, dive under, flat and shallow, nose skimming stones. I swim as narrowly as I can, pulling myself through the silk, letting a glide be enough. I swim out, to where the water, though never deep, is deep enough to dive down in search of the cold, and I swim across to see the house properly, fronted by ocean and private shoreline. There are new sun loungers now, a power boat tied up, white against the wall. The window frames are clean and new. I swim along, past the terrace I used to stare at the sea from while eating too much feta, past the gated steps I used to peer through when I had a moment to breathe.
Beneath the surface are all the fish. Wide white ones that look plain until the sun sparkles, revealing the long yellow stripes down their sides. Narrow nosed grey ones, silver shoals, numerous, everywhere, almost blue as they catch the refracted light, filter it with their effortless movement. And one, just one, with flesh divided into a rainbow, a pattern impossible to grasp as it weaves between the others, fast, bright, un-catchable.
I look up and the sky is bright and a boat roars in the distance and the house is there, almost the same and yet not really the same at all. There have been things I have done since last I was here that I did not know if I could do; just like I did not know I could do that job, I did not know I was capable of caring. Until I did it. And I am glad, now, that I did, not just to fulfil a duty, but to connect with my mum, as an act of service, of care in all its senses. These years have been many things and they have rarely been easy but they have been rich in many ways and they have allowed me to come back here, changed and grown, to swim in a sea that is not the same in a place that is almost the same and to breathe, for a moment. To stop and notice just how far we have all come.
"To stop and notice how far we have all come" a phrase to treasure.
Lovely post 🙏 I always said that f I could afford it one day, I would like to go back and live in the city where I was born, and from where we moved from when I was age 3. My grandmother continued to live there until she died when I was age 21, and after that, 15 years passed until I went back. I loved going back, and it still felt like home, but I realised that as much as I loved it, I didn’t crave living there anymore. I’d changed, and my sense of time and place had changed. It was cathartic to come to that realisation.