This quote came up from a page that I follow on Facebook called Philothoughts
‘To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.’ ~Heidi Priebe
It really resonated with me as I am currently caring for my extremely ill, probably terminally ill brother who suffers with alcoholism. I realised he was quite ill with this over twenty years ago so I am pleased that he is still with us. He is not functioning; he is bankrupt, divorced, long-term unemployed, banned from driving and unable to sustain friendships or work. Underneath it all though, he is still a person that I love and I feel compassion for. He is difficult, annoying, rude, unreliable, drunk most of the time, sometimes abusive, sometimes violent and unpredictable. But, as the song goes, he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.
It is a cruel illness and I used to make moral judgements about it and blame him. I suppose there is, at some point, an element of choice about it. At some point, he could have been stronger and he was not. But maybe he was not able to be. My parents paid for him to go to rehab, which he did and after three months in the centre, for four days he was much better. Then it came back.
However, his troubles and imperfections only really reflect those of all that we travel with. If you want relationship with others, as the quote says, you travel with them. You are part of their story, you are not writing it. Maybe some of us like to write because it is comforting to have characters that we do control - if you think you do and that they do not write themselves.
Good luck on your travels.