“Do you know something? You are the worst carer in the world.”
“And you are the world’s worst patient.”
Giving care, offering care, providing care—it’s quite a thing. Receiving care (waiting for help, enduring touch, choices made for practical reasons) is even more so.
The whole process of aligning mutual distance and the degree to which to involve oneself; the contrast between the weak and the strong, the passive and the active—it invites conflict.
A journalist cared for his wife after she returned from hip surgery. She asked him to open a window. He climbed onto a step stool, fiddled with the latch—and fell. With a thud, he landed on his wife, on her hip.
She called him the worst carer in the world. But care can be even more terrible than that. For example: I once saw a caregiver talk to a patient as if they were made of drool.
On September 12, you can visit Carehood at Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk). MOHA and Biljana Radinoska have created a game, a care game, a bingo variant that lets one experience the complexity of care and caregiving firsthand, if only for a moment.