Our marriage began underwater, during the rainy aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, on November 5, 2012.
City Hall in lower Manhattan was submerged in silence and silt, as if the city itself had gone underwater to dream of a new beginning. We had one option—head for high ground in the Bronx at the City Clerk’s Office. I remember the smell of wet leaves and the splashy sound of hydroplaning taxicab tires. Our new life together was bonded in something fierce, new, and even then, was already sowing rain-cloud seeds of a metaphor.
On the eve of our twelfth wedding anniversay, I pass a priest in the hospital hallway, and my gut tells me he’s just seen my husband, who has been fighting a pernicious infection for several weeks. The infection flaunts its ancient superpowers of destruction before the concerned faces of modern-day medical experts. It appears to be winning.
With his ice-cold fingers gripping my warm hand, my husband keeps asking two questions, over and over, in faint whispers.
“Why am I not getting better?”
“Why is this happening to me?”
There are no tidy answers to such questions. Only tides.
Perhaps it was survival instinct. I surrendered to water, the cleansing element of emotion, allowing it to take the shape of our marriage as its container, answering him by way of every happy memory I could recall from the day we met going forward. In that moment, while the current of illness tried to pull us under, I realized no matter the storms or silences between us, in the end, our shared memories are all that matter.
Later, in the quiet hours between nursing rounds, I reached for my journal and felt-tip pen. The act of writing gave my fear somewhere to go. The page became a shoreline where I could stand, breathe, and remind myself that even the most violent of storms eventually recedes, and the sunrises with fresh hope for a new day.
A Late-Night Synchronicity
It’s almost midnight on the day of our anniversary when I return home from the hospital. As I scroll through the river of email, I stop and open one from NPR and its election night coverage. In the middle of the page, I notice an invitation for caregivers across the country to share what they’d learned from tending to a loved one.
I pause to reflect on a truth I’ve been resisting. Caregiving rearranges you. It dismantles the illusion of control and replaces it with the rhythm of breath, of medication schedules and specialist appointments, home-care training regiments that become kind of a liturgy of beeping and burping technologies. Yet, amid all that data, handwriting in my journal became a ritual for holding on to who I am. Melissa, the writer. I click through to the NPR questionnaire. It was time to claim my space.
Months pass with no acknowledgment from NPR. I put it out of my mind, holding gratitude for doing the exercise. Then, the other day, I received a request for my photo and to sign a publication release. Out of more than six hundred responses, several of my answers were to appear in NPR’s Caregiver’s Surival Guide. It feels humbling to see words that once lived in the margins of my journals standing tall on a national stage.
Those words about learning to talk to doctors as human beings, not magicians, and how the caregiver sets the tone in the hospital room, were first written by hand. In The Signal & The Spiral, I often write about pattern as a form of creative intelligence. The spiral turns, and each revolution brings us back to something familiar, evolving into something new. Handwriting is a spiral in miniature. The ink curls and crosses, returning us to the body. It reminds us that the mind isn’t the only instrument of knowing.
Our hands think, too. They remember the grip of icy fingers, textures, pulses, gestures. They trace the unseen maps between grief and grace. When the world digitizes every detail, the handwritten line becomes a quiet act of defiance in the face of technological superpowers. Presence still matters more than silicon chips.
For Your Own Caregiver’s Journal
Ours is just one story in a vast ocean of caregiving. The numbers themselves feel tidal. Behind each statistic is a wave carrying countless private acts of devotion.
It is estimated that over fifty-three million Americans are now stepping into the role of family caregiver — one in five of us. The tide has swelled: from 2011 to 2022 the number of people helping older adults in home or residential settings rose by nearly a third. Yet despite these vast numbers, the inner life of a caregiver often remains quiet, handwritten in a notebook.
I find deep inspiration from writer Gail Sher, author of One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers.
In this spirit, I offer the following writing prompts for your caregiver’s journal or to share with someone who is a caregiver.
Begin with the Body
What does your hand remember that your mind has forgotten? Forget punctuation even exists. Write for five minutes, allowing the rhythm to lead you.
Name the Pattern
What repeats? Notice what repeats in the patient’s story, the doctor’s tone, or your own heart. What might that repetition be trying to teach you?
Offer Gratitude to the Unseen Helpers
Notice the qualities of the energy in the room. Does something funny a relative used to say suddenly spring to mind? Who calls to offer help just when you were thinking about them? There’s always more than meets the eye happening in our lives.
Trace Your Energy
Draw a simple spiral or circle. Where are you in the curve? Expanding, contracting, still?
End with a Whisper
Write one sentence that begins, “Today, I remembered…”
Let it be enough.
Because sometimes the body writes what the soul already knows.
And sometimes, in the act of writing, the tide turns.
Our thirteenth anniversary is around the corner. We look forward to creating new memories for years to come.