The situation
A parent — or someone you are now in the parent's place toward — has begun to lose themselves. The disease has its own schedule. Some weeks they are partly there. Some weeks they are not. The person you grew up with is being replaced, slowly, by someone whose body is the same and whose interior is changing. You are also, separately, exhausted in a specific way: the exhaustion of caring for someone who, in moments, does not know who you are.
The move
The hardest Stoic application. The dichotomy here, run carefully, is unusually clarifying. Up to you: the quality of your conduct toward them today. Whether you are present at the visit. The tone in your voice when they ask the same question for the sixth time. The pragmatic arrangements you can make for their care. The boundaries of what you can sustainably do. Not up to you: the trajectory of the disease. Their memory. Their personality. Which day will be a good day and which will not be.
The first column is small and tractable. The second is enormous and is doing what it is going to do. The temptation is to fight in the second column — to be enraged at the disease, to try by force of will to slow it, to take the worsening personally. The Stoic move is to let the second column do what it will and to focus your full attention on what conduct in column one looks like, today, in this visit, with this version of them.
The reserve clause — hupexairesis — matters daily. I will care for them, capacity permitting; I will sustain this for the duration, capacity permitting. The capacity is finite. The Stoic does not pretend otherwise. Burning out is not virtue; it is the failure of the practice to acknowledge what the practitioner can sustain. Ask for help. Use the systems available. The willingness to be helped is part of the appropriate action, not opposed to it.
The inn image, Enchiridion 11, applies here too. The parent you knew has begun to leave — partially, intermittently, irreversibly. The grief is for the person being lost while they are still in the room. This is a strange grief, less recognised, sometimes called ambiguous loss. The Stoic permits it. The grief is real. The person in the room is also real, and is your kin, and deserves the conduct of a kin even when they do not recognise it as such.
Source grounding
Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi 13: the reserve clause. I will sail, fate permitting. Apply: I will care for them, capacity permitting; I will return tomorrow, capacity permitting. The willingness to be refused, by the disease or by your own exhaustion, without abandoning the intention.
Marcus, Meditations 2.1: the morning preparation. Before the visit: name what the visit will probably be like. Name the wrong moves you will be tempted to make — impatience, the urge to correct them, the despair at the repetition. The rehearsal in advance is what allows the visit to be conducted in the register you want.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 11: the loan. The person you knew is being returned. The conduct toward who is now in the room is not erased by who is no longer there.
Where the popular version goes thin
- Be strong. Useless instruction. The Stoic does not perform strength he does not have. The Stoic acknowledges the exhaustion and asks for the help that makes continued care possible.
- Detach from the loss. Wrong. The detachment Seneca refused over a friend's death is even more wrongly applied here, where the person is in the room and the loss is in slow motion. The Stoic feels the loss; he conducts himself well anyway.
The commitment
Two things this week. (1) Schedule one specific kind of help — an hour of respite, a phone call to a sibling about logistics, a conversation with the doctor that has been deferred. One. Specific. This week. The Stoic asks; the asking is part of the practice. (2) Before each visit, two minutes of morning preparation. Name what the visit will demand. Name the version of yourself you mean to be in the room. The visit conducted from preparation is a different visit than the one conducted from depletion.