Caring for someone at the end of their life is a form of labour much harder to sugarcoat than the raising of children. It is, however, in many ways the same: You must have routines. There will be days when all you manage is to feed them at the appropriate times without snapping, and that will be enough. At either end of life there stretches a bracket of time when you will be in diapers. The best you can do is treasure your pelvic floor while you still have it. It will not get better. You and the one you care for will bounce erratically towards their death. It may take a long time or no time at all. It will be ugly. There will be tantrums. But love is at its essence the effort of dignity, and dignity you must give, to the best of your ability, and to the very last.

On and off between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-eight, I cared for my grandmother. She lived in a village in France, I in London, and my mother (an only child) in California. I was therefore the family member who was closest, who could be there quickest if anything happened. At times during those years I was also unemployed, and so moving in with Nana was a conveniently face-saving exercise for us both: she could pretend that I wasn’t there to look after her, I could escape my anxieties about feeling shut out of the labour market. Later, when she was moved out of the house and into a care home, I would visit her every week. I didn’t have a car so I cycled the hour there and back. I got good at hills.

I look back on that time and my abiding impression of it is that it is, to date, the greatest physical ordeal of my life. It wasn’t just the cycling, which I had to do for everything, groceries and all, but the act of putting your body, your hearing, your empathy—which are young and strong—at the disposal of another. I became so good at slotting myself into her thinking, in those early months, that I lost sight of my own needs. I lost loads of weight without noticing. It was my mother, when she visited, who noticed the scrunched drawstring of my pyjamas and said, “What’s this baby? We don’t like this.” So I learned to take time over my cooking for the first time, to feed myself with a sense of ceremony. I would go to the market and buy whatever was in season, and relish it as if my life depended on it. In so many ways, it did.

Care can be a very one-sided form of witness. In the midst of it all, I almost forgot myself. Finding the things which reminded me to take pleasure in my own company became the way of staying sane. Immediately after moving her into a care home in the next town, I walked to a lingerie boutique and spent hundreds of euros on silk underwear. I did it again when she died and we went to see her laid out in the funeral home. I vividly remember looking down at her hands, which were so beautiful, and feeling that there was a link in the chain missing. The eldest daughter of three generations of only daughters, I had always felt there was a strong maternal line behind me, but now we had lost one. And it was on me to replace it; to have a daughter. And I thought: Ah. This is how they get you.

Her hands were still beautiful the day they nailed the lid on the box.

Now, when there are the first stirrings of broodiness amongst my friends, I am glad to have had the grounding in care labour that I did. On a bad day, when the headlines wring their hands about the falling birth rate, I think it is a cover-up, that the world wants us women to head into child-rearing blind. One reaction I got when I was caring for my nana was a sense that I was somehow doing things in the wrong order; that I was too young to be doing this, that this was “not my role.” Meanwhile my mother, who still had a teenager, was keeping the show of her marriage on the road with herculean strength, was expected to shoulder this, sandwiched between the generations? Watching her, I gained an appreciation for how heterosexual marriage can so often end up being an assisted living facility for men. I offered to care for my nana because I loved her, but I also did it out of love for my mother, who cared for me when I was a tiny tyrant.

Now that Nana is dead, I am back in my life as I should, according to my education and background, be living. Sort of. I am in London. I am single. I attend the weddings of my friends. I cannot fathom the idea of getting pregnant on purpose any time soon. And I love it.