Set It Down

Set It Down — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

There is a kind of work that has no shift change.

It starts before the house is awake: a pillbox with seven little doors, a kettle, a hand on someone’s back to help them sit up. It goes on through the day in pieces. A phone call to an office that puts you on hold. A form. A drive to an appointment, and the long wait in a chair that was not built for waiting. It goes on at night too, when you sleep the way people sleep with a newborn, one ear open, listening down the hall.

You sleep the way a mother sleeps
One ear open down the hall

Nobody hired you for this. Nobody trained you. It arrived, usually on an ordinary day: a fall, a diagnosis, a phone call. Somebody you love needed looking after, and you were the one who was there. So you learned. You learned the names of the medicines and which one upsets the stomach. You learned how to lift without hurting your own back, mostly. You learned to say “we’re doing fine” in a voice that ends the conversation.

If this is you, this is written to you. It is a lullaby for the person who sings the lullabies.

People who care for someone else are often asked one question, and it is about the other person. How is your mother? How is he doing? It is a kind question. But a year can go by in which no one asks the second one: and how are you? After a while you may stop asking it yourself. Your own check-up gets moved, then moved again. Friends stop inviting you because you always say no. You are tired in a way that a night’s sleep doesn’t reach, and under the tiredness there may be things that are harder to say out loud. Resentment. Grief for someone who is still here. Guilt for feeling either.

They ask you how your mother is
Nobody asks about you

None of that makes you bad at loving someone. It makes you a person carrying something heavy for a long time.

Here is what this essay will not say. It will not say that you just need a bubble bath. It will not say that rest is easy to get, because for many people it isn’t: there is no money for a paid helper, no sister in the next town, no one else who knows the routine. And it will not say that everything will be fine if you put the load down, because you know better than anyone what happens when no one is watching.

It says something smaller. You are allowed to hand it to someone else for a while. Not forever. For an afternoon. For one whole night’s sleep. The load is real, and it is not a failure of love to let another pair of hands hold it.

There is a word for this, and it helps to know it because it is the word the offices use: respite. It means a break for the person giving the care. In the United States you can call or text the Eldercare Locator at 1-800-677-1116 and ask for the Area Agency on Aging where the person you look after lives; then ask them what respite there is. What exists is different from place to place, and we can’t promise what you will find. But asking is not giving up. It is how people last.

Asking isn’t giving up
It’s how you last the year

If you are not a caregiver but you know one, there is something here for you as well. “Let me know if you need anything” is kind, and almost nobody takes it up, because it hands the tired person one more job. Try a real offer with a day in it. I can sit with him on Thursday from two to five. I am going to the pharmacy; what do I pick up? I made too much soup. Then ask the second question, and wait for the true answer.

A world at peace is not only a world without wars. It is a world where the people who hold everyone else up are held up too. That is not a large political idea. It is a Thursday afternoon, and a neighbor at the door, and someone finally sleeping.

So this is the song. The kettle can wait. The list will still be there. Somebody has the watch for an hour.

Set it down.

If you are at the end of your rope, call or text 988 at any hour. If someone is in danger, call 911. A plain guide to help for caregivers, with the numbers checked against the agencies’ own pages, is at scarletbeast.com/caregiving. More help is at scarletbeast.com/help. Scarlet Beast is not a care provider, and this is not medical advice.

The song

“Set It Down” is a bossa nova lullaby made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the singer is synthetic, and the pictures are AI-made.

Set it down, set it down
You have carried it so long
Let another pair of hands
Hold the weight until the dawn
Set it down, set it down
It was never yours alone
You held up everybody else
Now let yourself be held

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