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When Sarah Geeson-Brown retired in 2022, she had a rough idea of how the next few years would go. She and her husband, Michael, planned to travel. But six months later, Michael had a stroke, then another. His third, after falling and breaking his hip, confined him to a wheelchair, and by the time he came out of hospital, Geeson-Brown was his full-time carer.
They had meant to be Interrailing, but now the end of the garden was far-flung, and even upstairs was out of bounds. Geeson-Brown, then 67, endlessly looped the ground floor of their home in Oxfordshire, England. “We both had to deal with a lot of grief,” she says. “There was lots of saying goodbye to things … Being out and about. And, of course, sharing a bed.”
Waking hours were governed by pill-taking – 19 a day – hoists, washing, dressing, trying to eat, medical appointments. Even with the help of professional care workers, the days were relentless, the nights interrupted.
“The word ‘care’ comes from the old English, caru, which means sorrow, anxiety, grief, trouble,” Geeson-Brown says. “So, you know, that’s quite a package.” The loneliest time was “going up to bed on my own each night … knowing it was never going to get better.”
Initially, her instinct was to jolly her husband along. “Your legs don’t work,” she would say, “but that doesn’t make you a lesser man.”
The emotional fallout felt harder to respond to than the physical demands. She could wash him and deal with incontinence. “But the mental side, that was the tough bit.”
In time she understood that “what helped most was to say, ‘Yes, this is a crap situation’, and to cry with him. Quite often we would cry, and then we’d laugh.” In this way, she says, she learned “to align with him”. She would lie beside him to talk, just to be the same height, and to remind herself “that we were still a couple – not a patient and carer”.
After a while, she noticed that although their world had shrunk tightly around them, it had, in unexpected ways, expanded.
“We had care workers of different nationalities,” she says. “I learned about Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa, Namibia … countries we hadn’t visited. It was a privilege to hear about their lives, families, backgrounds. I had this sense that, oh, maybe we are travelling in a sort of vicarious way.”
She and Michael had met in Hong Kong in 1988. He was working as a lawyer, and Geeson-Brown, then 32, had left her publicity job at the National Gallery in London to travel.
“There wasn’t a thunderclap,” she says. “But I liked him and he liked me. We found that we could talk to each other. And that didn’t stop for 38 years.” Back in England, they married and had two sons.
Geeson-Brown thinks that talking about love can “sound so Hollywood, or trite”.
But while she cared for her husband, she became so observant of him and his needs, so attuned to them, that she felt her love intensify. It was under constant examination, and so, she says: “I was given the opportunity not to take it for granted, but to see it for what it was.”
Their love felt alive to her; she drew on it deeply each day. It was “a gift”.
Small moments of togetherness delivered huge joy – watching the clouds, his hand reaching for hers. She cooked him favourite dishes, organised feasible adventures: lemon meringue pie, singing lessons, walks with the wheelchair.
When Michael died in January: “Everything felt a bit unreal.”
In March, rains fell. “I went into a slump,” Geeson-Brown, now 70, says. I thought: ‘You’ve still got life in you, and you’ve got to find meaning in it.’” She decided to help people take care of their gardens. The rhythms of nature are soothing, and she is able to apply “the patience and acceptance” that she unearthed while caring for Michael.
Becoming a carer was the toughest experience of Geeson-Brown’s life. But she found “a duality” in the toughness: an appreciation that went hand in hand with sorrow, and gratitude for what she had lost, alongside the grief. “You can choose [how] to look at things,” she says.
The small things remain the important things. “Human kindness, raindrops on a window pane, the burst of a robin’s song.”
