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“Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery that we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future.”
― Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

“The corn is planted first, followed by beans, then squash between the rows.They are called the Three Sisters. They sustain each other, the earth, and us. But the Big Ones do not know that. They do not care for the earth, and its children, properly.”
― Elizabeth Haydon, The Dragon's Lair

“Then he stared down at the twinkling lights and sobbed, "All my stars fell out of the sky.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Beautiful Dead

“At another time, or in another case, it might have excited my ridicule. But into what quackeries will not people rush for a last chance, where all accustomed means have failed, and the life of a beloved object is at stake?”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that's really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what's too high, or what's been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. That alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“I can only imagine how hard it must be for you, the friends and caretakers, to be there for us when you know in your heart that there is nothing you can do to make it better. So I want to tell you right now that you CAN make it better. You do. Just by being there. Just by reaching out, and making time and space for us in your lives and in your hearts. Just by saying, 'I know I can never understand what you’re going through â€� but I believe you. And I love you. And I’m here.”
― Michael Bihovsky

“Once the disease completely removes the person you once knew, all that is left is a hull of someone you once knew. That’s the first death. You know the second death will come. You just don’t know when.

JR Whitsell - That Moment In Time--Two: What If We Helped?”
― J.R. Whitsell, That Moment In Time

“Constant consciousness of old age's frailties really makes me appreciate youth. It's so interesting that we evolved to respond with automatic care to the young... while old age repels, makes us afraid of our own mortality.”
― Lucy Knisley, Displacement: A Travelogue

“I can only imagine how hard it must be for you, the friends and caretakers, to be there for us when you know in your heart that there is nothing you can do to make it better. So I want to tell you right now that you CAN make it better. You do. Just by being there. Just by reaching out, and making time and space for us in your lives and in your hearts. Just by saying, “I know I can never understand what you’re going through â€� but I believe you. And I love you. And I’m here.”
― Michael Bihovsky

“But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane?
All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.
There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on.
I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.”
― Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir

“Maggie? Who takes care of you?"

"Me?" She pulled away. "I don't understand what you mean."

"I bet you took care of your dad. I know you catered to Brian and Phillip. Who has ever taken care of you?"

"I'm f-fine. I can take care of myself."

"I know you can. But what if I want to take care of you? Would you trust me enough to let me?”
― Nancee Cain, The Rehabilitation of Angel Sinclair

“(...) is a good woman, but she gets overwhelmed by other people. She has to be careful of that. Taking care of others, it takes something, you know? It takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“Scattered pieces of my soul, shredded between hope and despair...when this journey is over, and you are gone, how do I sew them back together? They lie across our murdered history, like blood on the floor, a stain not even time can erase.”
― Judy Croome, Drop by Drop

“All these angry words I must hold into myself, choking on the fumes of what cannot be said: only wept.”
― Judy Croome, Drop by Drop

“This is how you make love to a cancer patient:
You pull her towards you as closely as you can and your thumb plays over each of her knuckles and you say, “I love you.�
You say, “I love you.�
You say, “I love you.�
She says, “I know.”
― C. J. Hribal

“I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there’s a little fire burning in there, a few steadily glowing embers, and a quiet chant going on, from me, from some singer in me, honoring and accompanying W’s soul, which is with him as he is making his passage. ..there’s a leavetaking in process, a movement towards increasing simplicity, away from complexity, activity, expectation. The bout of paranoia, with a childlike quality of being threatened, seems part of that-like a day or two when he couldn’t just let go and float on the energies of other people, who are bearing him up-but had to doubt them, struggle. So much better when he can trust and float. There’s enough love around him to carry him nowâ€�”
― Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir

“Of course Bridget couldn't afford the trip. Mr. Hoover had been especially rough on Kentucky. but she accumulated more than enough money for her passage. She had gone to each of the children, there were ten, and humiliated them to the point that they sold animals and automobiles and whatever they could find to sell to give their mother money. One son sold half his timber land. She made them feel guilty over not having enough children, not looking after her in her old age, not speaking Gaelic.”
― Kaye Gibbons, A Cure for Dreams