Wordwatch: Take care

The phrase “take care” seems to have become a favourite sign-off for emails. We don’t want to end so informal a communication with “Yours sincerely” or “Lots of love” – but we want to show concern. We often use the words, too, after a conversation, either face to face or on the phone. I find it odd: good wishes have been replaced by a command to look after yourself.

We tend to do that, anyway, don’t we? Surely such a communication, by whatever medium, should convey affection or, at least, regard. Are we being asked to read into the command some sort of personal concern? It’s a roundabout way of saying: “I am fond of you, but can’t be answerable for you, so you must ensure that I am not worried about you on account of your failing to look after yourself properly.”

To take care of someone is to look after them, to make sure they are safe and well. Here it relates specifically to the way people express concern for each other, deriving from the care that God takes for his chosen people, or for his Church. The good Samaritan took care of the traveller who was victim of a robbery, by binding up his wounds and paying for his accommodation at an inn.

Obviously, the casual sign-off doesn’t comprehend all these meanings. But it wants to suggest a warm, humane concern for the welfare of the addressee. But such expressions always end up becoming mere formulas (I wrote about “You’re welcome” recently) and “take care” somehow doesn’t lend itself to that: it seems to retain in itself too much of the original concern to sit comfortably as a mere flourish.

We have heard a lot about care homes, and the burdens that have been placed on them by the pandemic. In these places, care is often provided for people who are almost incapable of understanding what it is, or of articulating gratitude for it. Yet many old people are, silently or not, deeply appreciative of what selfless staff give them. A friend of mine has published Four Essays about Caring (2019), written in touching response to his wife’s decline into, and eventual death from, frontotemporal dementia (Pick’s disease). “Who is this person for whom the carer cares?” he asks, distressed by the disintegration of a personality he deeply loves. “Caring” implies a recipient of care, which raises questions about gratitude and conscious acceptance.

The carer in a home probably doesn’t have that intense personal engagement with the sufferer, but many – probably most – have a sincere concern for their patients which, although professionalised, can legitimately be called “love”. It can be likened to the equally professional love of a priest or religious minister for his or her flock, none the less genuine for being “part of the job”.

The very word “flock” carries with it the biblical connotations of the shepherd who “giveth his life for his sheep.” We’ve been made all too conscious that some care workers have indeed given, or at least risked, their lives for their charges. Caring is loving, in some meaningful sense.

So, when we sign ourselves off in an email with the injunction “take care”, perhaps we are really enjoining our correspondent to accept our love. Almost the same as the old-fashioned “with love” but designed to be spread more broadly across the many and various people we want to embrace in a warm sentiment in the courteously affectionate world of today.