Care-take
In Matthew López’s two-night play, The Inheritance, the third act of the first half closes as one of the main characters arrives at a house in upstate New York that served as an unofficial hospice for gay men in the AIDS crisis. He is greeted, one-by-one, by the ghost of every person who died there until the stage is full and the audience weeping and the man at the centre surrounded by people who loved his friend who gave them a bed to die in. A modern gay retelling of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, the plot hinges on intergenerational and cross-class romance and with it, intergenerational wealth and wisdom transfer: a house passed down not to lovers or children but promised to others in community, who will use it to tend to those the state fails. A commentary on the different kinds of care we can offer when we are well-resourced, literally or figuratively. The ways queer people make family and hold open doors for each other, in life and death.
In an interview in Zweikommasieben Magazine, Johanna Hedva talks about how the words caregiver and caretaker mean the same thing, both “framed in debt logic”, a “trading of deplet(ing) resources”. In her author bio she says, “there is always the body – its radical permeability, dependent, and consociation – but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitability fails”. There is a social expectation that care is consistent, reliable, and reciprocal, a trade of equivalent services amongst equals. We will show up when asked and follow-through on promises or the gesture does not count. In a society in which rolling waves of virus wrench our bodies and our care webs, in which many of us are taking turns being more or less seriously ill, in which wealth and safety and access sits unevenly across our communities, this is an impossible ask.
I tended a lover once who had burned herself up offering care until she ran too hot to hold for long; who needed an open door to come and go. She melted from gentleness in action and touch, soaked up sweetness like dry ground, preferred to burrow her hand in my pockets instead of reach for mine for fear of sparks, received the ordinary offerings of a host to a guest like kindling. But she could not bear the expectation that she return the following week, or return the favour, even if the favour was desirable. There is only a small difference between to hold and hold still, one a lover’s softness and the other a demand. A siren can be seduction, an alarm, or an indication help is coming. The fire in my bed, perceptive, on guard, heard all layers of meaning and held herself out of reach for fear of coming undone in the wind.
The ways in which I have been taken care of when sick are innumerable and insufficient, kindnesses rattling around a crater-sized gap in care left by the public health system, who decided my survival was a lost cause. At no point in this long illness was the care I returned to those who tended me the same shape or size. When I could not drive, I became a passenger princess and brought snacks for the road. When I could not follow a recipe, I traded prepped meals for bags of locally-milled flour I’d ordered too much of in my brain fog. When my loved ones got sick too and I could not leave my bed to go to the hospital with them, I took on the labour of research made lighter when it is less personal and prepped talking points for their appointments.
In queer dating, we talk of the “campsite rule” — leave your lovers in a better state than you found them, particularly when dating across age gaps or other distances, a guiding principal meant both for aftercare after a night of play and the cumulative effect of intimacy and its withdrawal. I think of this sometimes in the waiting room of doctors’ offices — the impossibility of not experiencing harm from attempts at care when the treatment is so new and untested, the risk of not intervening equally high, how rarely the medical system is funded for sufficient follow-up. Long COVID is not a disease you catch or a single virally-activated switch but a series of always-possible, interconnected complications to fundamental mechanisms, that can spiral out into severity if left unchecked. A body left in firefighting mode so long it burns up its own instructions in case of emergency.
In the play, whose plot arc stretches across a century and lifetimes, characters shift from caring to cared for, sometimes trading places due to illness or age or income, or how we fold differently in the arms of different lovers, how queer love makes play and desire out of power imbalances and taking uneven turns, uncouples sex from other intimacies, sweetens our inequities into safety.
We are, unavoidably, mutually, vulnerably, made tender by tending, by laying bare what we can and want to offer and receive, and the inevitable discrepancies between the two over a lifetime or between loved ones. To want is to risk losing what else we carry when we reach. I could not bear to take from my friends and offer nothing back but company, even if my gestures opened more gaps through the damage of overextending myself. I could not bear withholding the care my lover needed, though showing my hand risked losing her entirely to the fire.
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about fainting, the aesthetics and labour of illness, or the role of patient-research. To support this project, share it online or subscribe.