Adele Descaro’s mother passed away right before Christmas. While she missed her mother, Adele was relieved to know she was no longer held prisoner in a body that refused to serve her. It had been four years since the stroke that left her crippled, nonverbal and able to communicate only with her eyes and facial expressions. Adele had been her primary caretaker for those four years and now, with Elaine at rest, she could get back to her own life. If she could remember what it was.
She was thirty-two and had actually spent the last eight years mostly as a caretaker. Mostly because Adele had also helped to care for her disabled father for four years. Her mother had done much of the work and then, within just a few months of his death, she had suffered her debilitating stroke. Devastated by this cruel turn of events, Adele resigned from the part-time job she’d taken as a bookkeeper at a local inn and dedicated herself to Elaine’s care full-time. There had been help from a visiting nursing service and from Justine, her much older sister. Justine was, in fact, twenty years older, now fifty-two.
Adele was happy she had made her mother’s care her priority, but was aware that in doing so, she had allowed herself to hide from her own life, to put off her own growth and keep her dreams and desires just out of reach. Now her opportunity was at hand. She lived in the comfort of the home she’d grown up in, had friends in her little town and the time to pursue whatever her heart desired.
Justine, a successful corporate attorney in Silicon Valley and the mother of two teenage girls, hadn’t been able to pitch in much time so she contributed to the cost of Elaine’s care and provided a modest income for Adele. She had made it a point to stay with Elaine every other Sunday so Adele could have at least a little freedom.
The truth was that for the past four years, or actually eight if you really thought about it, Adele had been fantasizing about how she would reinvent herself when the time came. Now that it was here, in the cold rainy months of a typical Pacific winter, she realized she had yet to come up with a plan.
Adele had left her graduate studies in English Literature at Berkeley to return home when her father was released from the hospital. “To help out,” she told her mother. Her father, Lenny, had been a maintenance supervisor for the Half Moon Bay school district and had taken a bad fall while trying to fix a heating vent in the ceiling of an auditorium. He was in a body cast for months, had several spinal surgeries and spent years either in traction or a wheelchair. But the worst of it was his pain, and he became dependent on powerful pain medications.
Adele’s mother needed her help, that was true. But she might still have continued her graduate studies. But Adele had another problem. She fell in love and got pregnant—accidentally. The father of her baby didn’t want the child, so in addition to her pregnancy, she suffered a broken heart. She’d intended to raise the child on her own but she’d suffered complications; her baby was stillborn and her already broken heart was completely shattered. The safety of her home was her refuge, even with her disabled father’s condition casting a pall over life there.
Then, as if to drive home the fact that she was not quite ready to get on with her life, her mother had her stroke.
And now, here she was, still with no plan whatsoever. She gazed out the kitchen window. It was early March in Half Moon Bay, and fog sat on the beach every day until noon. It was like living in a heavy cloud. Adele had no motivation whatsoever. She found herself eating a cardboard container of lentil soup from the deli while standing over the kitchen sink, alone. She was wearing a lavender chenille robe and had slopped some soup on the front. She was not ready for bed early; she hadn’t bothered to get dressed today. She could have spent the day reading great literature or better still, drafting a life plan. Instead, she’d watched a full day of M*A*S*H reruns