Caregiving Unzipped: The Snow Days

 

The snow came. Not as deep as predicted, but enough to complicate everything in our area. Road clearing has been slow, though improving. My apartment complex is one of the good ones — they cleared our internal roads early, even if it meant piling snow behind our cars. That’s one of the reasons I live where I live and pay what I pay. They do the basics reliably.

The aide I have scheduled for today, tomorrow, and Thursday lives far from town, and her complex hasn’t cleared their internal roads at all. She’s stuck, and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Now, I *do* have another aide who lives right here in my complex. Very convenient. No travel issues. No snow problems. But even with that convenience, I asked the agency to take her off our schedule. Because proximity doesn’t make someone the right fit for caregiving — whether it’s dementia care, elder care, or special‑needs care.

This is the same aide who wore a distressed, fuzzy, open‑face balaclava for her entire shift — the kind of thing that made her look halfway between a person and a plush bear. My dad kept looking at her with confusion, trying to figure out what he was seeing. And imagine someone helping you with intimate care while dressed like that.

She’s also the one who left broken hair bands all over my couch, stepped over things on the floor instead of picking them up, added dishes to a full sink, and did the bare minimum before sitting on the couch for the next two hours. That’s not caregiving. That’s just occupying space.

And then there’s my weekend aide. She’s young, probably from another country originally, and not 100% familiar with American ways — I still need to teach her how to cook eggs, what toast is, and that hot dogs are not breakfast sausages. But she never stops working. She sweeps, mops, does laundry, keeps the sink clear, and is gentle and patient with my dad. She’s almost perfect.

And then there’s my snowed‑in aide — the one I rely on because she’s so good with my dad, and just a genuinely nice young person. I might not see her this week. She called off today, and I declined a replacement. I certainly declined the one who lives across the parking lot. Later I learned just how snowed‑in she really is. Her complex hasn’t cleared anything, and they’re not required by law to do so. She hopes they’ll get to it, but I’m not holding my breath.

So if she calls out again tomorrow, I’ll accept a new aide. And then another the day after. And the day after that will be someone new to replace the one I removed. Last week, Sunday, today — a lot of callouts and no‑aide days.

But I’ve been doing this for 16+ years alone. I can cope. I can push through. We’ll be okay. It wears on me harder now, but that’s life. I even dug my car out of the snowbank behind it. Old‑school type, me. That’s just how we do it.

And at the end of the day, this is what family caregivers do. We adapt. We absorb the callouts, the weather, the mismatches, the last‑minute changes, the days with no help at all. We keep the household steady because someone has to. We learn to shovel out cars, rearrange schedules, teach new aides how to make toast, and say no to the ones who aren’t right. It isn’t easy, and it wears on us, but we keep going. Not because we’re heroes — but because this is our person, and this is the life we’ve built around their care. Family caregivers bend so the whole system doesn’t break.

Thus Is the Doom of Men — A Poem

---

Thus Is the Doom of Men

It is the doom of men that they forget.
It is the doom of men that they regret.
It is the doom of men that they beget.
It is, for them, their nature’s grim epithet.

Inevitable upon the human scale,
Weighted against weights that always prevail.
Such is their ancient inheritance:
To live, to breathe,
To breathe and breed,
And then to die,
As they fail.

They must forget — for memory would paralyze.
They must regret — for striving is a self-made lie.
Ignorance becomes a sheltering fold,
A veil drawn over truths already told.

It is the doom of men that they forget.
A prophecy foretold, a prophecy fulfilled.
Such is the nature of men, distinctly distilled.

Written on the skin of every newborn,
The wrinkles mark beginning and the end.

Yet in the doom of men, a spark remains.
A quiet flame that flickers through their pains.
For though they fall, they rise and try again,
Defying all the fates that govern men.

It is the hope of men that they forget —
Not only wounds, but victories unmet.
It is the hope of men that they regret —
For regret becomes the seed of better yet.

And though the weights of life forever press,
They carve out moments of defiant tenderness.
A laugh, a vow, a hand held in the night —
Small rebellions against the dying light.

Such is the paradox they carry in their chest:
Doom written in their bones,
Hope written in their breath.

This is the doom of men that they beget.

Copyright January 2026 M. W. Van Dyke
All Rights Reserved

David Byrne Lives Rent‑Free Inside of My Head - A Poem

 

David Byrne Lives Rent‑Free Inside of My Head

Some rhythms never leave the body.
Some videos never leave the mind.
Where the gesture ends, the resonance begins.
My poetic resonance.

---

That video, it calls to me,
It calls out to me, inevitably —
the way old currents call to dry riverbeds.
Same as it ever was, same as it always did.

Once in a Lifetime.
Always talking in my head.

That video, it calls out to me,
a motion half‑remembered from a life I never lived.
I reached out for it once again, same as I always did,
Same as I always would,
Same as I always will,
More than once in a lifetime.
Inside of my own talking head.

More than once in my lifetime.

That video, it calls to me,
and something in me answers, inevitably.
Same as it ever did,
Same as it always does,
the rhythm flows to me where I am.
Same as it ever did.
Same as it always does.
More than once in my lifetime.
Living in me, rent‑free.

Water flowing underground.

The rhythm rises inside of me,
The poetry floods me from within, deep.
There is water flowing underground,
Same as it always will be,
the kind that shapes a person, quietly.

There is water flowing underground.

The rhythm rises inside of me,
The poetry floods me from within, deep.
There is water flowing underground,
Same as it always will be,
the kind that shapes within me quietly.
There is water flowing underground,
I can hear the sound and the prose once again,
feel it tugging at the edges of my thoughts,
Inside of my talking head.
Same as it ever was,
Same as it always does,
Same as it always will be,
Always once again.

More than once in my lifetime.

Yes, I found it for myself, yet again.

---

Copyright 2026 M. W. Van Dyke
All Rights Reserved

The Woman and the Horizon - A Poem of Self Discovery

 

The Woman and the Horizon

Behind her, the shore dissolved into foam and then nothingness —
a place she’d lived, but never quite belonged to.
Names, duties, expectations… all thinning
like miasma carried away on a cruel wind.
Abandoned, with purpose.

She learned this new sea by increments —
the tilt of a deck, the hush before a swell,
the way silence can chafe more deeply than sound.
Each hour unstitched another thread of who she’d been,
and she let it fall, ungrieved, into the dark water,
to float away and be unseen, especially by herself.
Abandoned, with purpose.

The days lengthened into a kind of quiet reckoning —
the sea offering no comfort, only clarity,
its vastness pressing her into the shape she’d avoided becoming.
What remained of her old self clung like salt to her skin,
and she washed it away without ceremony,
letting the tide claim what she no longer needed,
replaced by new seasoning, and somewhat painfully, new skin,
abrased and changed, with purpose.

The horizon met her without welcome or warning —
a thin, indifferent line that suggested nothing
yet revealed everything she had tried not to admit.
It stretched before her like a truth too simple to deny,
a place where the self she’d resisted stood waiting,
unpatiently patient, eager as the breaking dawn,
and she stepped toward it, raw but unafraid,
drawn forward with purpose.
She was not new, she was revised, and refined.
yet was still at her core, herself.
She drew closer to herself, with purpose.

The sea calmed beneath her as if recognizing
a steadiness inside from what she’d scoured clean and raw.
No revelation waited at the docking, no grand unveiling —
only the tranquility of a self no longer ripped asunder by doubt.
She stood at the rail, the wind threading through her,
and felt her world align without fan, or fare, or ceremony,
as if the horizon had simply stepped aside
to let her pass into the life she’d been circling for years.
Not claimed, not conquered — simply met.
She moved forward, wholly, fully with purpose,
And she met herself — for the first time, once again.

---

Copyright January 2026 M. W. Van Dyke
All Rights Reserved