Giving and receiving care are what we’re made for

Pastoral care, Gregory the Great once wrote, is the art of arts. That evocative phrase is brought to life in The Soul of Care, a recent memoir by anthropologist and physician Arthur Kleinman. Kleinman describes caregiving as grounded in presence that embodies the liveliness and fullness of being and in the willingness to stay turned toward another, even in the midst of pain and confusion. For Kleinman, the soul of care is improvisational and awake to the dimensions of existence that can’t be fully known or described.

Kleinman writes about how, after his wife, Joan, developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and began not always to believe him when he told her that he was her beloved husband, he learned to take her hand and kiss it, assuring her that she was loved and that he was who he said he was. When even those loving gestures failed to reassure her, he would improvise and pretend to be someone else, someone who was there simply to help her. Others took their cues from him. Once when Joan wandered out of the family circle in a busy subway station, her five-year-old granddaughter took her hand, kissed it as she had seen her grandfather do, and gently led her back.

Like his granddaughter, Kleinman was lucky in his mentors, who taught him to listen beyond the surface of his interactions for what he calls their “human tone.” A neighbor whose husband had a disability, a boss when he worked in the New York City sewer system—they don’t tolerate any romanticism from him, insisting on the reality of their lives and teaching him to be present to it.