Illustration by Catherine Chan
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I used to think caregiving began with a diagnosis.
A doctor’s office. A hospital room. A sentence that split life into before and after.
But in my family, caregiving arrived in a much less dramatic way. It showed up on a gravel lane in rural Ontario, with my mother’s walker coming out of the car trunk like part of a badly planned getaway.
My parents lived on a farm, the kind of place where life is measured by weather, crops and routine. The driveway was long, the coffee was always on, and after supper Mom and Dad often went out for a drive. They would check the fields, stop at Tim Hortons for a coffee and visit family along the way. My sister lived about 10 miles away in one of the farmhouses, so many evenings they would head up her long gravel lane for a visit.
It was ordinary. Familiar. Part of the rhythm of country life.
Then my mother’s doctor decided she should no longer be driving. But my mother decided the doctor was completely unjustified and, frankly, had a lot of nerve.
If you have ever loved a strong-willed parent, you already know how this goes.
Mom’s Just Busy Living tour helped with the in-between time, one foot in joy, one in grief
In Mom’s mind, she was fine. Maybe not perfect, but certainly fine enough to drive to Tims, check the crops and make her usual rounds. In her children’s minds, she absolutely was not. We reasoned with her. We explained. We asked her not to drive. We had the surreal experience of telling the woman who once taught us to drive that she should not be behind the wheel.
She listened politely in the way mothers do when they have no intention whatsoever of taking your advice.
One evening, Mom and Dad headed out as usual. Mom was driving, Dad was in the passenger seat. They did their rounds, then turned into my sister’s long gravel driveway. About halfway up the lane, the two of them must have realized at the exact same time that if my sister saw Mom driving, there would be trouble.
So they stopped.
Dad got out, went to the trunk, pulled out Mom’s walker, and the two of them staged a driver switch in the middle of the driveway. Problem solved.
Except, of course, it was not.
Because my sister was driving up the lane behind them and saw the whole thing.
If you can picture it, the gravel dust, the panic, the walker, the sheer optimism that this little roadside shuffle might go unnoticed, it was the kind of scene you laugh about later, because if you don’t laugh, you might cry in the Tim Hortons parking lot.
That moment has stayed with me because it held so much of caregiving in one scene. It was funny. It was ridiculous. It was also a flashing warning light that things were changing, and changing in ways none of us wanted to fully admit.
That is how caregiving began for me. Not with one dramatic event, but with a slow dawning. A repeated question. A little stumble. A missed appointment. A quiet realization that the people who had always been our safety net were no longer entirely safe on their own.
Mom chose MAID. I now accept it offered what she wanted: a loving exit
My parents were proud, practical farm people. They had built a life through routine, resilience and sheer grit. They were the ones who solved problems, not the ones other people worried about. My mother especially did not ease gracefully into needing help. She saw herself as the same capable woman she had always been, only now surrounded by people making an awful lot of fuss.
And that, I learned, is one of the hardest parts of caregiving: the painful gap between how someone sees themselves and what is actually true.
Caregiving is often spoken about in tender language, and it is tender. But it is also repetitive, awkward, exhausting and, at times, unintentionally funny.
Humour has a place in caregiving because without it, the heartbreak would be too heavy to carry.
There is so much people do not say out loud about this stage of life. No one tells you how exhausting it is to always be on alert. No one tells you how lonely it can feel, even inside a loving family. No one tells you that grief often starts long before death.
Taking the keys from a parent is never really about the keys. It is about freedom. Identity. Pride. It is about understanding that the thing they are losing is bigger than transportation. It is one more sign that the life they knew is changing, and they did not ask for that change.
As a daughter, that shift is heartbreaking. Somewhere along the way, love changes shape. It becomes less about being cared for and more about doing the caring, even when it is inconvenient, misunderstood or resisted.
But caregiving also taught me something beautiful. It taught me that family is built just as much in the hard moments as the happy ones. It taught me that dignity matters deeply, but so does safety. It taught me that sorrow and humour can live side by side.
Caregiving is love, in one of its hardest forms.
Katharine Perry lives in Williamstown, Ont.