Finding empathy in the dark side of caregiving and ageing

Trust the Wings

By Barbara Schultze
Edenridge Press
2025

Getting old is often not pretty: incontinence, managing medications and doctors’ visits (if one has the luxury of a family physician), navigating the medical system, making and getting to appointments – all of it can be overwhelming. Care management often falls to relatives. Yet some live too far away, some may be in similar circumstances of need, some could have personal challenges and some may simply not want to help. It may be fulfilling when helping results in gratitude and becomes a blessing to both parties, but sometimes help, even when it’s desperately needed, is unwelcome and care meets with resistance, perhaps even abuse. 

Such was the case with Avi, a hospital executive in Barbara Schultze’s novel Trust the Wings. On an impromptu visit to her dad, Avi arrives at her childhood home, finding it empty and the door unlocked. The local police station phones. Her father has been picked up for indecent exposure while intoxicated. The officer coincidentally (the book has a lot of coincidences) is a former boyfriend, and the immediate crisis is solved. 

‘I don’t need you’ 

Avi’s father is belligerent and hostile, alienated from all his children. No placement for him can be found, so she must manage his care. Her dad suffers from Frontal Temporal Dementia. He says he “doesn’t need her help,” adding, “I told you, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m perfectly able to take care of myself. Go. It can’t be too soon!” 

Avi’s ambitious career plans are turned upside down. She resigns from a prestigious New York job to move back into her old bedroom and look after her dad. From working in an executive suite with a personal secretary and a brass name plate on her desk (Aviana Lehrer, RN, MSN, Chief Nursing Officer) she faces a new reality: she becomes a “lowly” nurse in Alliance Home Care to make ends meet. “‘She could be running the place,’ she grumbled, ‘instead of slogging along in an entry-level position.’” 

“Who do you think you are?” asks a client. Avi is learning – and changing – who she is. Over time, juggling her dad’s needs with her client’s needs, she slowly understands the power of empathy. In treating broken people, Aviana finds purpose in life, a purpose beyond personal ambition. She changes (as do many of her home care clients). 

Plots and subplots 

The book reads more like a memoir than a novel; the author, Scultze, has herself been a home care nurse and is now a hospice chaplain. With so many client stories it is sometimes difficult to keep names straight. Then there are plots and subplots beyond the stories of clients: Avi discovers her mother’s journal hinting at “scars” from violence, traumas experienced by her brother and sister, hints of incest and her own (unusual) medical diagnosis.

The book’s strength is its intimate portrayal of caring visits. Avi enters homes with no idea of what she will face. One patient is in a crack house where Avi keeps pepper spray handy for safety; another neglected client has a bed sore infected with maggots; a woman sleeps in a urine-soaked bed. There are descriptions of oozing bed sores, addictions, odours and cockroaches, and filthy settings (and numerous references to rubber gloves and sanitizers). The author walks us into scenes showing sides of humanity and aging that we might not like to think about – the dark underbelly of disease and neglect, not to mention dementia with its unpredictable aggression, belligerence, unreasonableness and idiosyncrasies.

The name Aviana comes from Latin, meaning “bird.” Starlings, owls, sandhill cranes and crows all make an appearance during Avi’s change of focus. Avi’s mother died while young, but her oft-repeated expression “Trust the Wings” brings comfort. I suspect the author alludes to the Mother eagle’s wings in Isaiah 40 that promise to carry us through all times, sweet and bitter.