I’ve been having a hard time these last few days. I’ve been waking up angry, going to sleep crying, and feeling fed up in between. This is so far from my usual self that (up until last night) I was baffled. Was it hormones? My diet? The full moon?

When I shared how I was feeling with my caregiving support group, two wise women who have walked the path put it clearly. “You’ve hit the wall.” they both said. As soon as I heard the words, I realized how well they fit.

I’ve long been familiar with the term “hitting the wall” as it applies to running. In running, you hit a point where your muscles are starving for oxygen and you physically feel like you can’t move. It literally feels like you have slammed into a wall, and it takes effort to keep moving. Your entire body is screaming at you to stop.

It’s a bit harder to see when that wall is emotional. I didn’t realize it had happened at first. All I knew was that I was suddenly more tired than usual; I was losing patience with everything, and I was flying off the handle at myself for stupid stuff (“you stupid a$$hole—you didn’t flip the eggs right!”). I chalked it up to going through The Change and waited for it to pass. It didn’t.

The outside stresses seemed to mount. A friend died unexpectedly. My insurance said cataract surgery wasn’t covered. Jack had a slew of bad days that pushed me to the limits of my patience. Tim broke the news that he was leaving. I had a payment issue with my classes that resulted in a fairly large (for me) credit card bill. I am still paying that down.

I started waking up at five. Then at four. My brain was loudly reminding me of everything I should be/shouldn’t be doing when I was trying to sleep. I would lie there trying to organize all the to do lists into coherency so I could get some rest. I finally got up one morning and dumped the whole thing into my journal. It filled, so help me, two and a half pages.

But the crowning blow came one night last week, again when I should have been sleeping. I was lying there thinking about everything I needed to do, and the one thought I’d been trying to ignore suddenly became crystal clear. “Jack isn’t going to get better. No matter what you do it won’t be enough.” How do I deal with a thought like that, especially at two-o-clock in the morning?

I didn’t realize until that moment that part of me was hoping that Jack would get better. Now reality has sunk in: he isn’t going to. How do I make peace with that?

My first response, as it always seemed to be, was to question everything I’d done up to that moment. Was there something I missed? Did I not work hard enough, feed him well enough, give him enough stimulation to keep his mind from slipping away? What did I do wrong?

The answer, hard as it is to take, is nothing. My love is not strong enough to keep him from going. But it is hard to accept that no matter how much effort I make, I can’t stop the progression of this disease. To quote my caregiving friend, “Now you see what’s on the other side of the wall. You will readjust your GPS and your cruise control and you will go on.”

Now I have to create the how. I have to decide how I will come to terms with this ‘elephant in the room’ and continue moving forward. I will have to find my own way because there is no caregiving map to follow. There are only guideposts placed by the ones who have gone before me. I will still have to make my own path.