And then something else happens that shifts the needle from caregivers to the patient – to his inner life and dazed thoughts, which may have nothing to do with his daughters’ concerns.
This is one of those risky, tone-altering devices that can take a viewer out of a film. But it fits a theme that emerged a short while earlier: the unknowability of people, or how a person’s entirety can (perhaps) only be processed through his absence – as opposed to the many disconnected bits you experience at different times while he is alive. Shortly after we see the three daughters trying to find the right words for an obituary, the father stops being an abstraction for us and becomes real. We even get a hint of something about him that the protagonists didn’t know.
In an online session some years ago, a friend and I discussed how illness-centred films are often more about the caregiver than the patient. We spoke of Shoojit Sircar-Juhi Chaturvedi’s October, and other films such as Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (which His Three Daughters reminded me of), and about how caregiving in general can seem like a self-absorbed, self-congratulatory act even when seriously discharged.
The women in His Three Daughters represent different faces of the caregiver: from the ones who worry from a distance, to the one who is there round the clock, shouldering most of the burden and frustration – and who has earned the right to behave erratically once in a while, to seem remote or uncaring.
I can relate well to this latter version. During my caregiving years for family members, many dimensions of my personality competed for space daily: the attentive and mean-spirited, the vulnerable and contemptuous.I also saw a great deal of the process through which a once-sentient human being becomes a shell, so that it’s easy to forget that a complex, multi-layered person had inhabited this eroding body and mind: whether it was my grandmother, one of the sharpest people I knew, trying feebly to get things done in her late 80s, or my father – once aggressive, now helpless, at the mercy of attendants (and a son who might, on some level, have seized his chance to be the bully, taking revenge for earlier times).The most proximate caregiving, though, was for my mother. And I think often about the final days when she wasn’t quite there, incapable of doing anything but gasping sporadically for breath with her eyes closed (even when she was sitting up in bed, in a position that was least painful for her).
The toughest moments were the ones when Lara, our canine-child, whom mum loved immeasurably, would walk past her line of vision and I would see (or imagine I saw) mum’s eyes flickering. I would wonder then if, in the midst of all her pain, she was also worried about the people and animals she loved, and how they would manage without her. I wanted to believe that she had completely slipped out of consciousness, that she wasn’t aware of anything.
I thought of this again while watching that dissonant late scene in the film, and it felt vaguely therapeutic. It offered the consoling possibility that in her last days, my mother’s mind was somehow in a space free from pain and worry, perhaps turning over memories of remote things that I had never known about. Even the most dedicated caregivers, control freaks as we sometimes are, don’t have to be on top of everything.
