Growing older means taking responsibility for life and death

PalmWe've grown up, and suddenly, we've all become an army of caring ants. Without knowing how, it's become an organism that, step by step, weaves a network capable of supporting any living being who becomes our responsibility: in-laws, nephews, parents, ex-partners, mothers, godmothers. Caregiving has invaded conversations with my friends, and now I can't stop thinking about it, I can't stop chatting with them. Almost simultaneously, we've all had a preview of what our maturity will be like, and it seems we'll need each other a lot. In the following examples, the names are fictitious, but the stories aren't: Carla lives a plane ride away from her parents because she didn't want a long-distance relationship with her partner, and now no one is taking care of her when she has to care for a family that isn't her own; Paula is the only child of divorced parents, and just as she's had her son born, she's also had to become a mother to sick parents; Cristina should be worried about her mother, who hasn't recovered since her depression, but now her sister is going down the same path, and that's what's causing her anguish.

Nobody prepared me for that either. But a day came when the need for care reached me, when it fell into my hands like ripe fruit, leaving me no choice but to pick it up. A day came when the need for care began to spill out from all sides of the people around me until it fell upon me. Only then did I realize that it was only a matter of time before it reached me too. Funerals are often a good rite of passage into taking charge of the less glamorous parts of life. And I say "good" because you learn, whether you like it or not. And I say "less glamorous" in every sense: less beautiful, more hidden. When my godfather died, I had that feeling, of becoming an extension of my mother and godmother: comforting relatives, choosing a niche, deciding what we would do from now on. It was like climbing a step, or like the two of them stepping down one. I could see everything almost at the same level as them, from the same perspective. I saw the reverse side of life. I saw all those things that someone had taken care of until then so that, precisely, I could only see the front, the facade, the snowdrift in front.

I think growing up is feeling like the reality you knew starts to fold and turn inside out, slowly turning your universe upside down. Growing up means no longer being cared for because you're the one doing the caring (and getting even older means accepting that you can't care for anyone anymore and you have to let yourself be cared for for a little while longer). It means having a part of someone's life entrusted to you and, above all, instinctively learning what to do with it. When you start caring, it's always improvised. No matter how prepared you are, it always feels unexpected. I think that no matter how old I was, I would never have been prepared to be the one to shave my grandfather. Just as Carla wouldn't have been prepared to cook for her in-laws, nor Paula to bathe her father, nor Cristina to accompany her older sister to the psychologist. Each of these gestures shapes our adult lives, like a kick that stitches together this world that's coming back to us.

But when caregiving arrives, it acts like this, like a gastric balloon inside the stomach. It takes up so much space that there's no room for anything else, not even for what was so important until the moment everything came crashing down. The needs of others—when those others are, for example, your mother or father—expand with such force that routine, tasks, and time itself give way, taking on shapes you never could have imagined. And you no longer care about being someone in life, or about Pilates class, or even putting on a halfway decent face. Everything falls apart. And you recover "all the things that used to make us human," as the journalist Joan Cabot recently told me in a conversation. I had asked him if we ran the risk of idealizing times gone by, and he replied that he was the least nostalgic person he knew, but that "today almost anyone would agree that everyone is looking out for themselves, and not for the collective." And it's made me think that the people we love—who aren't necessarily family—are the smallest example we have of what Juan referred to as "the collective." They are an opportunity to show that we know how to act in accordance with what we are: simply, small beings in need of care.