Gail Sheehy can still hear the doctor saying, "It's not benign."
Getting the call about her husband's cancer launched the bestselling author into the caregiver's role, an experience she describes as one of the least understood in "Passages in Caregiving."
She was married to Clay Felker, the editor and journalist who founded New York magazine; she saw him through a 17-year battle with cancer before he died nearly two years ago at 81.
"It's not a book about dying," says Sheehy, 71, "but about periods of living with reprieves and learning to reinvigorate your lust for life."
In the step-by-step guide, she covers the bases of caregiving from her experiences and from interviews with dozens of other caregivers of the elderly and chronically ill.
Question: What is one of the biggest mistakes a caregiver might make?
Answer: You cannot do it by yourself. You have to have a circle of care, involving other family members, friends and professionals. It becomes too overwhelming by yourself. The needs increase as the person gets more and more needy and dependent. I outline in the book the various agencies and networks who can help.
Question: You write about caregivers who go solo and try to play God. Why does that backfire?
Answer: As long as you are catching mistakes and bird-dogging everything, you feel important. It's good for the ego. But when something goes wrong, if you're God, you're going to think it's your fault. That's a straight chute down to guilt. You have to come to a point of acceptance that there is a God, but you ain't it.
Question: Did you ever find yourself playing God?
Answer: Yes, I was there. Once I recognized it, I went to a 12-step program to cure myself of it and really began to understand the serenity prayer.
Question: What else can illness teach people?
Answer: During a period when Clay was healthy again, we made it a ritual every weekend to take a walk and re-examine what he could do. A cancer psychiatrist told us when you're not excited about life, your immune system is sluggish. You have to show your immune system you're worth fighting for.
Another specialist said, "Go out and do something wonderful you wouldn't have dared to do before this crisis." Anybody who comes to a crisis point in that last third of life needs to go through that exercise, because there's something you can do that nobody else could.
Question: What did that "dare" end up being for you two?
Answer: His epiphany was remembering his love for shaping talent. He accepted a wonderful position at Berkeley working with journalism students who hung on to his every word. He was the guru from the East who knew all about magazines. It was a wonderful new chapter of life, plunking us into a new subculture that didn't focus at all like the East.
Question: People can be tempted to drop everything to take care of a loved one. Did that happen to you?
Answer: Some people faulted me for not giving up my job. I needed a support system, too. I needed to continue to be myself when Clay got the West Coast job. I kept my connections in New York because I didn't want to lose contact with grandchildren to come, my friends and my publisher. I can't reproduce all of that in another part of the country. So I flew back and forth. It was a little tiring, but having a replenishment of ideas when I went to New York and then returning to California and seeing Clay was a wonderfully full life for me. We fell in love all over again.
Question: When the end of life nears, how can a caregiver cope?
Answer: You need to practice spending time away from your loved one. It teaches you there is life here, and it's not all about illness. This is the time to save yourself. Keeping Clay alive was not within my powers. I had to give myself permission to fail.