I Couldn't Care Less: She Ain't Heavy
Created | Updated Mar 23, 2014
She Ain't Heavy
Last week I watched an episode of Highway to Heaven with my wife. It stars Michael Landon (the dad from Little House on the Prairie) as Jonathan, an angel who wanders around with his earth friend Mark, helping people out and making lives better. I can't say it's my favourite program; at times, especially when any sort of music is playing, it's like chocking to death of syrup. But it does avoid being preachy, and it does confront a lot of genuine and sensitive issues. In this episode Jonathan and Mark are trying to help Scotty, who is quadriplegic, which is to say none of his limbs work.
Scotty seems to have adjusted to his disability in many ways, his hi-tech (for the 80s) wheelchair and computer can be operated using just his mouth, his brother lives with him and looks after him, driving him around in a specially customised van, and he has a successful career as a consultant of some sort. But he is lonely, and conscious that everyone but him seems to have someone else in their lives. With a little help from Jonathan (not Mark, who is usually amusingly useless) he finds a girl and she proposes. Job done. Except he says no.
Why? Well, he loves her and all that, but he doesn't want to saddle her with his disability. His argument is that she would have to sacrifice her own career and pretty much the rest of her life to looking after him. He can't even eat without help, so he doesn't want to reduce the woman he loves to a life of spoon-feeding and doing all the driving. It's a reasonable enough point and, although he is talked out of it, the plot misses a crucial perspective in this argument: the carer.
Do I want to be a carer? No. It's not easy, it's not fun, it relies on my wife suffering in a way I don't want and it sets big challenges on our relationship. But the trouble is that in asking that question, you're not really getting a complete answer. 'Your wife needs care – do you want to do it?' Ask that question and the answer is completely different. Because if she needs care (and she does) then I most certainly want to be the one to do it. I would want to do my best to cater to her needs even if they were comparatively modest, but making the care more challenging doesn't just up the stakes, it also raises the pot, so to speak. To put it in real terms: the more care my wife needs, the greater my desire to look after her, the greater the reward for doing so. That's oversimplifying, of course, but if you love someone, I think, you want to look after them and try to make them safe, healthy and happy. If that person keeps you at bay to spare you the trial, they aren't saving you, they're depriving you. For the caree, that is a fact worth remember. For the carer, you should consider the possibility that the person you care for feels like a burden, and try to avoid perpetuating that idea if you can.
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