Anticipatory Care

Carol J. Adams

I’ve been talking to my dogs more frequently these days because, as I tell them, they have no idea about the coronavirus pandemic or at least aren’t communicating their thoughts about the issue to me.

Today, Inky the rescued Minpin lay on the penultimate step to the second floor as I leaned over to address him on this subject; “You don’t know anything about this, do you?” He was barely committed to the conversation. As I rubbed his back, I thought about a recent call from my sister.

She had called to urge me to set up a sick room in our house, now. Now, she directed, before either my partner or I fell ill with the virus. She listed items to put in the room (extra sheets and towels, cleaning supplies), the tasks of preparation we should do now. I dutifully wrote the list down but found that when she said “and clear off all surfaces, now,” I stopped. Perhaps we have more tchotchkes than most, but the idea of clearing off all the surfaces of the designated sickroom seemed going too far.

The fault line between the real and imagined threat of coronavirus could be found right there—will I do something about those surfaces populated with items? The idea is that if you remove them now there would be less surfaces that might contain the virus to wipe down if someone were ill with the disease. I should have been thinking of the real possibilities of the needs of an ill person. As someone who provided care to others, shouldn’t I have traversed the space between the real and the possible more easily? A quick read of Jessica Lustig’s “What I learned when my husband got sick with coronavirus” could have jumpstarted my priorities.

All the years of caregiving for our parents that my sisters and I shared, following what I called “the rule of the good daughter,” and here was the first test of what a post-parental caregiving situation might require. I was balking.

My sister continued, “Don’t shake out the dirty clothes before washing them.” Who, I wondered, shakes out clothes before washing them anyway? But such a specific image, the sick person’s clothes, the need to wash them, the need to wash your own clothes after tending the sick person, the person standing in front of the washing machine, seemed to bridge the real and the possible with urgency.

She said, “You need a Plan B, you get sick, and Plan C the person you live with gets sick.” She was urging what we might call anticipatory care. Of professional caregiving, in crisis because of federal inaction, an eviscerated health care system, and the absence of needed equipment, there is not much we individually can do—unless we are sewing masks, a nineteenth century answer in a twent-first century world. For collective caregiving, our responsibility is clear—flatten the curve.  Personal caregiving such as Jessica Lustig describes (Advil in a plastic dish, doing laundry, trying to get her husband to eat something, wiping down the shower, switches, faucets, well . . . everywhere) is learned in the work of it. The reports, such as Lustig’s may awaken us to anticipatory care—this practical work of thinking about “what if the virus strikes home?”

It is said about a creative venture that you have to imagine something before it can come into existence. But, in general, this is not how personal caregiving evolves. A need comes into existence and caregiving is the necessary and immediate response—a broken leg, Alzheimer’s progressing—so often we figure it out on the go.

Anticipatory care, as my sister urged, and as Lustig implies, recognizes that we or someone we love may be next. It might begin with ensuring all capable members of a household—if we live in a household—know where the sheets and cleaning agents are, know how to use the dishwasher and the washing machine, if we are lucky enough to have access to those appliances. The Centers for Disease Control help us if we struggle with imagining what is required.

What if we acknowledged that a part of life is thinking ourselves toward our own deaths, thinking ourselves toward a possible role of caregiver or care receiver?

I ended my essay in Critical Inquiry with a question:“It’s a quandary and an epistemological concern: can the noncaregiving world comprehend or encompass the world of caregiving?” Lustig has seen no sign of it:

It’s as if we [her family] are in a time warp, in which we have accelerated at 1½ time speed, while everyone around us remains in the present — already the past to us — and they, blissfully, unconsciously, go about their ordinary lives, experiencing the growing news, the more urgent advisories and directives, as a vast communal experience, sharing posts and memes about cabin fever, about home-schooling, about social distancing, about how hard it all is, while we’re living in our makeshift sick ward, living in what will soon be the present for more and more of them.

If the pandemic situates us so much closer to caregiving than many have ever been, still anticipatory care on its own won’t transform a noncaregiver into a caregiver. Lustig talks about the people walking past the door of a clinic through which she and her very ill husband must exit, the passing pedestrians oblivious to the illness on the other side of the door. Think of the crowds who showed up to watch the USNS Comfort arrive in the New York harbor—arriving, they hoped, for them.

Those who have been through hell have told us what we need to do, tchotchkes be damned.

5 April 2020

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Carol J. Adams is a feminist scholar and activist whose written work explores the cultural construction of overlapping and interconnected oppressions, as well as the ethics of care. Adams’s first book, The Sexual Politics of Meat, is now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. She is also the author of Burger and coauthor with Virginia Messina of Protest Kitchen: Fight Injustice, Save the Planet, and Fuel Your Resistance One Meal at a Time, and of many other books. A new and updated The Pornography of Meat (2004) will appear in the fall of 2020. The visual accompaniment to The Sexual Politics of Meat will include 340 images sent from around the world by Adams’s readers, whom she calls “grassroots sociologists.” She is working on a memoir of her mother based on her essay from the New York Times, “Finding Myself in My Mother’s Calendars.”

www.caroljadams.com