Somewhere in the middle of those eighteen months, I stopped being able to do the sums.
There was my dad, who needed me more each week, medication to check, bad nights to sit through, a 3am Uber that had become almost routine by then. There was my job, which didn't pause. And there was my son Thomas, who was seven, and my partner Bex, who were both still waiting for me to come home and actually be there when I did.
Nobody tells you that caring for a dying parent doesn't just take hours out of your day. It takes a version of you that used to belong to other people, and it hands that version over to the person who's dying, because of course it does, because how could it not.
The maths never worked
I want to be honest about something that doesn't get said enough: there was no way to do all of it well. Not really. Every day was a set of trade offs I hadn't chosen and didn't know how to make.
If I was at Dad's, I wasn't reading Thomas a story. If I stayed for the story, I was thinking about Dad the whole time I was reading it, only half present, my body in the room and the rest of me somewhere else entirely. If I gave my partner a proper evening, undistracted, I felt the guilt of my dad managing alone. If I went to my dad's instead, I felt the guilt of another evening my partner had to carry on their own.
There wasn't a version where the guilt didn't show up. It just moved around, depending on where I'd chosen to be.
Being a part-time dad while trying to be a full-time one
Thomas was seven. Old enough to notice I wasn't always there. Not old enough to understand why, not really, no matter how carefully I tried to explain it.
I think this is the part that stayed with me the longest. Not the exhaustion of the caring itself, but the low hum of guilt that sat underneath every normal moment with my family. Watching Thomas play and thinking about how many of these evenings I'd missed, or how distracted I'd been for the ones I hadn't. Wondering what he understood, at seven, about why I kept disappearing to see Grandad, and whether he'd remember this stretch of his childhood as the time I wasn't really there.
I don't have an answer for how to fix that feeling. What I learned, slowly, is that it can be carried differently. I stopped trying to be fully present everywhere, because that was never possible, and started trying to be honestly present wherever I actually was. If I was with Thomas, I tried to actually be with Thomas, even for twenty minutes, rather than being there in body while my head was still at my dad's house. It didn't erase the guilt. It just meant the time I did have counted for something.
What I'd say to someone in the middle of it now
If you're doing this right now, work full time, a parent who needs you, a partner and children who also need you, I don't think there's a version of this season of your life that feels balanced. I think you're meant to feel like you're failing everyone a little, because you're trying to be fully available to more people than any one person can be fully available to.
That doesn't mean you are failing them. It means you're a person, doing something that would strain anyone, and the guilt you're carrying is evidence of how much you care, not proof that you're getting it wrong.
A few things helped me hold it, even if they didn't solve it:
- I stopped pretending I could give everyone my full self at once, and started giving whoever I was with my actual attention, even briefly.
- I let my partner see how hard it was, instead of trying to manage it quietly on my own. Carrying it together made it lighter, even slightly.
- I forgave myself for the evenings I wasn't fully present, rather than adding that guilt on top of everything else.
None of that made the eighteen months easy. But it made them survivable, for me and for the people I was trying, imperfectly, to still show up for.
Why this belongs here too
The Bridge of Lights is about the people we lose, but it's also about the people who are still here while we're losing them, the partners and children who quietly absorb the parts of us that go missing during those hard stretches. If you're in the middle of that juggling act right now, I see you. It doesn't get easier overnight, but it does get more bearable, one honestly present moment at a time.