What have you learned along your caregiving journey? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
I was raised primarily by my grandparents in Western North Carolina. As I was growing up, our home was full of literature, music, and...plants. Seriously, we had plants everywhere. My grandmother, like many Southern women, was an amazing gardener and plant mom. It seemed to me that all she had to do was look at a plant, and its leafy tendrils sprang from the soil. We called her “Ma-C,” a name that originated as a family nickname but was soon adopted by the entire community.
Our home smelled faintly of soil and lavender, with tendrils from pothos plants curling down bookshelves, and wide-leafed calatheas sitting on windowsills. Sunlight filtered in through the lace curtains and kissed the green leaves, making the whole house feel like a quiet jungle.
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As a child, I grumbled about having to care for the plants. I wanted to be outside riding my bike instead of working with the plants alongside my grandmother. Together, we watered, fertilized, snipped cuttings, and repotted (which I’m still terrible at!). I hated the cool grit of damp soil under my nails, and the way the heavy clay pots chilled my hands, even in summer. The fertilizer spray left a slightly bitter, antiseptic smell in the air, and I counted down the minutes until I was free from those chores. What I didn’t realize at the time was that, during those sessions, she wasn’t just teaching me about plants; she was teaching me about life.
Our home smelled faintly of soil and lavender, with tendrils from pothos plants curling down bookshelves, and wide-leafed calatheas sitting on windowsills. Sunlight filtered in through the lace curtains and kissed the green leaves, making the whole house feel like a quiet jungle.
My grandmother taught me to remove leaves as soon as they turn yellow, even if the leaf is my absolute favorite. “But why, Ma-C?” I’d pout when she told me to cut a leaf. “It’s never wise to hold onto anything harmful, no matter how good it looks,” she explained. She taught me that it takes any living thing a lot of energy and struggle to die, but once it’s gone, it’s at rest. No matter how you try to fight it, whether that’s with fertilizers or surgeons, everything living will go on in its own time. “There is no power on the day of death,” she’d say, which I knew was from scripture.
And then came...my grandmother’s dementia diagnosis. We knew she’d been 'forgetful' for a couple of years, but it started with small things: Misplacing the morning paper, turning to the wrong channel for the evening news, leaving the peas on the stove for a little too long.
When I left my grandparents’ home for college and into my young adulthood, I vowed not to have plants. I happily spent my early twenties without them. Aside from a gifted bamboo stalk in my college apartment, which I neglected horribly until it eventually died, I had no plants in my space. And it felt just fine. I was able to dedicate my spare time to throwing and attending college parties, sitting poolside at my complex, and figuring out how to use the new “it” thing, Facebook. I didn’t miss finding the proper lighting for a pothos or birds of paradise at all.
And then came graduation, and with it, my grandmother’s dementia diagnosis. We knew she’d been “forgetful” for a couple of years, but it started with small things: Misplacing the morning paper, turning to the wrong channel for the evening news, leaving the peas on the stove for a little too long. At school, we’d just read about ginkgo biloba, and I came home and told Ma-C it helped with memory. “I need some ginkgo biloba, then,” she responded. She knew.
My grandmother taught me to remove leaves as soon as they turn yellow. She taught me that it takes any living thing a lot of energy and struggle to die, but once it’s gone, it’s at rest. No matter how you try to fight it, whether that’s with fertilizers or surgeons, everything living will go on in its own time.
After my college graduation, and her diagnosis, came the years of heartache, caretaking, overwhelm. The endless doctor’s appointments, the hospital stays, the experimental medications, the in-home hospice workers. Two years after college, I was in law school with a full course load and full-time caretaking responsibilities. I’d made the decision to attend a school 45 minutes from my grandparents’ home so I could move back in with them to help.
I’d leave for school between 6:30 and 7:15 four mornings a week. Immediately after my last class, I’d hit the road for home, knowing that medicine needed to be taken at seven, so dinner needed to be eaten by six, so I had to get home to cook (or bring something I’d picked up along the way) by 4:30. I didn’t share with anyone at school what was going on at home, and classmates wondered why invitations out were so frequently declined. Friends outside of law school wondered the same, and eventually, invitations stopped coming.
At my grandmother’s funeral, I sat and listened to the stories told and memories shared. It was a reminder that the person she was at the end wasn’t her, and I felt no sadness on that day at the gravesite. I knew she was free.
A few days after the funeral, a neighbor came by with a card from the neighborhood, a few restaurant gift cards to make sure we were eating, and…a pothos. She knew enough about my grandmother to know that this houseplant had been one of her favorites. The pothos was placed in the breakfast nook by one of my relatives, right by the sun-warmed window where Ma-C once sipped her tea and read the paper aloud. In the mornings, golden light poured over the table, illuminating the grooves of the old oak surface. The pothos sat there for days as, one by one, family members began leaving to return to their homes and lives.
A few days after the funeral, a neighbor came by with a card from the neighborhood, a few restaurant gift cards to make sure we were eating, and…a pothos. She knew enough about my grandmother to know that this houseplant had been one of her favorites
I reluctantly took over the care of the pothos, and I was surprised by how naturally things came back to me. “Plants, like people, thrive best when everything is in moderation,” I heard my grandmother saying in my heart. “Lead with love and gentleness, as they will get you places that demand and haste can’t.” I had spent several years running to the pharmacy to pick up meds, cooking, ordering supplies, and just generally taking care of things. But after she was gone, I had more time than I knew what to do with. I was used to my grandmother’s schedule, and without her, without that schedule, I was lost. But caring for the pothos required creating a new schedule, and that helped more than I even realized at the time. Water on Sundays…fertilize every week in spring and summer, less in fall and winter…be attuned to the changing patterns of sunlight. Between the pothos and my new internship, the pain of grief eventually dulled.
Over the next several years, I got plants that my grandmother had given to others to save for me, cuttings from other plants that she gave to family members and they cared for, and plants that I bought myself. Almost 14 years later, I still have the pothos. I also have 56 other plants; monsteras are my favorite. I imagine myself telling my granddaughter one day, “Look at how the leaves split. Remember, sometimes things have to break apart before they can grow and thrive.” It’s something my grandmother would have said…If she’d actually liked monsteras!
At the end of it all, I found my own love for plants. Plants were part of my inheritance, something that she passed down to me that’s as valuable as the other things she gave me. In the plants I inherited from her, in the knowledge of how to care for them, and in the life lessons they bring, I hear my grandmother’s voice and feel her love.
What have you learned along your caregiving journey? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
