This is a very touching audiobook.
The literary critic Gabriele von Arnim tells of how her husband - the prominent television journalist Martin Schulze, who died in 2014 - suffered the first of two severe strokes on the day she announced the separation and for the last ten years of his life becomes nursing care, paralyzed and barely able to speak, but still completely clear mentally.
There is no longer any question of separation.
Immediately the feeling of connectedness is there again.
“The greater the danger, the more she wants him to live.
The less she can imagine losing him. "
In addition to strokes, there are pneumonia, embolism, a week-long coma, a tracheotomy, cardiac arrhythmia, palatal paralysis, severe pressure ulcer, an almost fatal sepsis after a "hospital germ", a patient mistake and other oppressive experiences in the medical and care sector. A wealthy and well-insured ARD journalist did not have to get to know at least the financial hardships that many other families are confronted with in addition to the misery of illness.
Friendly nursing staff can be paid, and the excellent social embedding cushions a lot.
Because the paralyzed can hardly go out into the world, the world is invited to be a guest, even if the sick can hardly actively participate in the conversation.
A locked-in fate that is difficult to deal with for someone who was used to determining discussions.
Illness is an offense.
"Because there must be love"
Gabriele von Arnim, born in 1946, does not surround her own behavior with a glimmer of selfless sacrifice. She does not want to be a "carer woman" who atrophies about it herself. And she knows about the difficult balance between caring and abuse. She questions herself again and again, even if she cannot and does not want to answer the most delicate of all questions: Was her own behavior a trigger for the first stroke?
Psychosomatics is an abyss in which one can lose oneself. In the meantime she developed cancer herself. She also talks about it, and she describes the mixed feelings that are associated with caring for loved ones. “I often found the spit trickling from the corners of my mouth unsavory. When he was able to eat a little himself again and kept getting dirty, I also reacted irritably. ”Nor does she hide her“ unwilling groan ”when he calls again and again for the pee bottle or the bedpan. The voice with which he does it has changed a lot. Gone is the “sonorous concert pitch that I once fell in love with, this deep, raw, erotic timbre”. Now there is only a "croaking gag". Still, it sounds good when he assures her every day that he loves her.She returns this love resolutely. “Because there must be love,” she noted in her diary. This is the only way to endure the “dragon seed of unreasonable demands”. “It is easier to care for people lovingly than to do the service with an empty heart.” One hears these sentences with amazement. Obviously, love is not simply unavailable or unavailable; it can be generated with good will.