This is where my mom sleeps. It's changed quite a bit from what it used to be. Previously, I'd be welcomed by a double bed — shared by my mother and father. But today, it's two single beds, warmed by my mother and our helper.

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My father was my mother's rock, and he was also her primary caregiver for the first few years after her diagnosis. He would tend to her every need, love and devotion erasing all traces of exhaustion should my mother so much as call, "Ah Tong?"

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That love went both ways, which was why no one took my father's passing harder than my mother. The grief from losing her husband was, and remains, very difficult for her, preventing her from sleeping well even now.

 

She wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes, and our helper recounts them, how she wakes up to frantic knocking on the other bedroom door, my mother awake — confused most of the time, and terrified at other times. 

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She calms her down, holding her hands and guiding her back to this room — a routine my father handled before his death. She repeats words he used to appease her with, "it's okay, you're safe. It's late, let's sleep", and sometimes it works. Sometimes.

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But I've learnt something from these nights, in this room, and it's that caregiving isn't purely just medication and meals. It's about being a lighthouse in someone else's endless, crashing dark.