I have just been on the phone for an hour and a half with a friend who was recently widowed on the other end. Her husband died eight days ago and was buried on Friday, the visitors left today and she was ready to be debriefed. I don't mind as I am trained in this sort of thing and she is a good friend.

What worried me most about what she had to say was a statement that she has always "just followed along" behind her husband. That although she has had what others would see as a career she was only really marking time until her husband retired. Like Ray he retired early and although they did have those years of travel and following the sun that most think of as what you do when you retire she always felt that she was uneasy with the situation, always fearing that he would over-reach himself because of his poor health.

The reason I was so worried about what she had to say was that there is a small echo of what she said in my life. That uneasy feeling that I get as a caregiver that if Ray and I have a happy day today we will somehow get to pay for it in the future. That we should somehow have "made the most of what we did' knowing somehow that we would not always continue to do those things. Where in the name of goodness do these guilt-ridden thoughts suddenly come from?

A posting I just read was about whether or not you feel guilty for having your stroke. Well, if asked as a caregiver if I felt guilty about Ray's stroke, I might whisper "yes" because sometimes I do. Not that I drove him to it but I saw all kinds of warning signs (particularly of the diabetes)and yet didn't somehow force him to take better care of himself and take his health seriously. Then as now I could only tell Ray so much before he built up a head of resentment and did the opposite of what I had suggested.

Women are supposed to be the caregivers, or that was an assumption in the world I grew up in, even as a post-war baby and a baby-boomer to boot I was still brought up as a future wife and mother. My sister, born three years later seems to have grown up in a different world, where the words "careers for women" were already in vogue. But in my eyes women had jobs, before after or during marriages but only to earn enough to keep themselves and the children in "little extras", never as a career. And Sandy, please don't jump on me for saying this again, I never imagined women could earn a lot of money. It just didn't happen in the world I was brought up in. So when I went out to work I got a "job", worked until I married, stopped for children, worked a little, then part-time, then full time but still making my home, husband and family my major focus.

I am not apologising for all this, it is just the way I looked at life. I think the feminist movement changed my outlook a lot, and for a while I was a housewife/worker/feminist if there is such as thing. My plunge into theological training honed my defensive argument skills and raised some eyebrows. Did real women think the way I did, some asked, you know, the ordinary women in the pews? How should I know, I answered. My own views change a lot, swinging between the old me and the new feminist me, influenced by what I am reading, who I am listening to. Come back to me in a while and I will tell you.

I left after a year in college and came home to my old job, the housework, the family. I took on a new split job, part-time parish assistant, part -time public servant. Nothing major changed until Ray's major strokes. Now I have to be housewife, mechanic, gardener, assistant -in- nursing. I have a really mixed bag of roles, as all good caregivers do.

I don't have a husband I can follow now, I have one I have to walk beside, hold up, struggle with against all the difficulties he faces. I have a husband who cannot hold me up either. I do walk behind him but only when I push him in the wheelchair. And although I would love to be able to do all that we had planned to do in our retirement, we can't. So our life is a compromised version of what we had planned it to be.

No don't you feel sorry for me, as I said to my friend tonight there are a lot of light moments in being a caregiver, an early retiree, a woman who "can do a lot more than she thought she could do".

Maybe being outside of the picture we had planned our lives to be like is like climbing to a higher point of the mountain than that which we would have reached treading the easier path. Maybe it is the rarefied nature of the air that takes our breath away and causes those tears to roll down our cheeks unbidden sometimes. Maybe that is why we are more solitary and yet stronger and sometimes even wiser than the folk we left behind on the lower trails.

I was never one to look for trouble but when it came along as it does in all of our lives, I tackled it as bravely as I could. I still live life that way. I tackle one problem at a time as they come along. I don't look for trouble and I deal with each event as best I can. Maybe there is a better way to live, if there is I don't think I would have the energy to tackle it right now.

"Oh, yes I am wise, but it's wisdom born of pain" from the song "I am woman".