AGING IS AN ART: After Janet
I don’t know who I am!
For the first two weeks or so after Janet died, I felt like I was floating. Something in my mid-section kept me afloat — off the ground. I mean, I knew that in one reality I was walking, but in this new after-her-death reality, it was like my feet never touched the ground. I wasn’t walking from place to place; I was floating.
Ungrounded! For the better part of five years, I was totally defined and absorbed in and by my role as Janet’s carepartner. Then, on Dec. 15, 2025, at 5:33 p.m., all that changed. Janet was gone and, at 5:34 p.m., I had no idea who I was.
I made the transition from anticipatory grief about losing my partner of nearly 20 years to being present with actual grief. It’s when you transition from preparing for the inevitable to experiencing it. A grief website puts it this way: “It’s when the rehearsal of loss meets the actual event.” Having spent my life in theatre, I find the analogy apt.
Janet, having shared in my theatrics, would appreciate that one.
I soon discovered that this sensation of floating is common among carepartners transitioning from anticipatory grief. When the ground you have so solidly constructed for five-plus years suddenly drops out from underneath you, what do you do?
You survive. You float. The floating has stopped, but then I found myself, day by day, attempting to contact that person I was before being Janet’s carepartner.
Each of my daily experiences felt new. Going to Ramone’s for lunch and not watching the clock felt new, driving north without asking when I should be home felt new. I had done all those things before, the pre-carepartner me, the me of six years ago. But I could not make contact with that previous version of me!
I have since realized that I will never be that person again, nor should I want to. The five years spent as Janet’s caregiver, the honor of being there when she decided it was time for her to go, the entire experience has changed me forever. In honor of Janet and the life and death we shared, I need to embrace the reality of a new me.
Like many other former carepartners, I am newly unknowing of who I am. We are on an exhilarating yet painful quest to discover who we are now — after … .
If you meet one of us, be patient, and know we are just learning how to walk again.
John Heckel, Ph.D., is a retired HSU theatre and film professor with a doctorate in psychology, and a member of the Senior News Community Advisory Council.
After a lengthy illness, his wife, Janet Patterson, took end-of-life prescribed meds and died on Dec. 15.
Contact: jh2@humboldt.edu.
