"Are you sure they're gone, or have you stopped seeing them?"
Join Bob and I on a journey of reconnecting with our selves.
]]>"I'm not sure what I'm doing here. I don't feel very hopeful for the future".
"Want to pick a Faery Card?" I playfully asked. I'd been giving readings all morning to staff and residents and Bob was watching with mock curiosity.
He gave me a 1/2 smile and full sigh.
I was often curious, like Bob, as to the reasons for his residency here. Sharp cognitive ability, reasonably healthy. When lacking, those are two of the main reasons for nursing home placement My intuition told me he had nowhere else to turn.
We'd been engaging in conversations for some time now, during my bi-monthly visits over the past several months. We'd talked about what he felt was lacking in his existence. The list was so long just talking about it made him depressed.
I fanned the cards in front of him while he continued to lament.
"I don't know why I left my last relationship". Several years after his wife died he was introduced to a woman of abundant financial means which was a new experience for him. "Although she was a pleasant enough person, and I really liked not worrying about the money" he said, "she just wasn't my type."
My curiosity got the better of me. "It seems a bit conflicting to wonder why you left, yet be able to articulate the reasons. What is it you're not seeing?"
This was a bit of a stunning question for him, and he absent-mindedly picked a card.
"You know, it's the faith. It's the belief that things will work out. I lost it somewhere along the way."
We're funny with faith. No matter how much past experience we have with things working to our best and highest good, once we have a challenge that confuses us, it shakes what we'd thought was iron-clad faith. We are an evidence craving species yet don't connect with the evidence after we've made the choice, conscious or unconscious, to question our faith.
Bob was able to re-tell a story he'd shared with me some months ago, about what he was sure was a guardian angel who appeared out of nowhere, contributed to Bob's well being, then disappeared without a trace. "Why can't I get those angels back here?"
"Are you sure they're gone, or have you stopped seeing them?"
A light bulb went off and he turned the card over.
"New Opportunity" the card read.
He offered a full smile this time and his sigh was in the form of a cleansing breath.
"This is it! Someone was here the other day asking that I write some of my experiences for a local publication. I started but for some reason it felt forced. It felt forced because I'd forgotten to ask for help."
I visited Bob a few weeks later and he had begun writing. He recited a series of poems for children he's been working on. He confided that he still felt down about his situation at times but has been able to more easily access the story of his guardian angel who he now feels is in his presence most of the time.
In the meantime, we'll work together to find the support that will allow that connection to flow more naturally.
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My father-in-law listened as his friend’s wife described, in excruciating detail, the ordeals she has been facing. It upsets him deeply, though he would never interrupt her, or let on that he was distressed. (He just handed me his doctoral thesis , Investigations of Linear Control Input-Output Relations by Matrix Methods Systems, taking his mind off the things that he thinks about these days when he is alone).
I’m sitting here, wanting to ask him about…things. He sees me typing and hesitates to interrupt (there’s that word again), but he is digging through the copious archives of his life as an engineer and mathematics professor. “Apparently my whole life is in that box”, he just told me, saying how even the article when he did a book signing for Operation Highjump at a local library was in there, and much of his academic as well as his time spent in fire service in his local community.
He’s reading now, sitting next to me, keeping his 86 year old brain as active as possible. I have many stories about how he does that, for another day.
Back to topic at hand: his lifelong buddy in the nursing home. He was asked if he’d like to visit him. NO, was his emphatic and final answer. I knew he did not want to be cajoled into going.
And here I sit, the question hesitating on my tongue: What is the main reason you’d prefer to not see him?
And the questions I won’t ask: Is it because you’re reminded of your own mortality? Is it because you would not want to feel the emotions that would inevitably arise, watching this lifelong friendship dissolve into the ethereal? Or is it that you would prefer to remember him as the fit, healthy doctor he was for so many years?
I suspect it is a combination of those things.
He is now showing me a book on grammar that he uses for a little friendly banter when he engages with an old time girlfriend. He reconnected with her after his wife passed away, almost 8 years ago. They write back and forth, catching each other on grammar, or syntax, or mistaken facts. “All in fun”, he is fond of saying, but I know it serves a much greater purpose for both of them. It’s an important connection to the past, a link to the present that keeps him feeling relevant. A way to (he hopes) keep his mind active and flexible.
And I am no closer to asking that question. He is so animated right now, so engrossed in the present through his past, now I dare not interrupt.
This morning I came across an article about relationships and our attachment to them. It discussed our conditioning when it comes to attaching ourselves to people.
As my mother grew into her nineties, she taught me, as she had learned herself over the years through her own loss of two spouses, the importance of how a faith greater than anything on earth, can help you be in relationships happily, healthily, without a needy dependence.
She did not teach me this by lecturing me, she did not even set out to teach me this. The way I learned this was by spending time with her, and observing her amazing grace.
Elders can have a subtle, gentle, powerful way of leading us and showing us a way to greater awareness. What it takes from us is an investment in our selves, recognizing the importance of learning at the feet of the ones that came before us.
This tradition has been lost, and I do believe contributes just some of the stress we see in our world today.
I cannot change the world’s attitudes by myself, or make anyone understand the importance of this tradition to humanity, but if you help me spread the word, and begin to practice this tradition yourself, together we can make a difference.
Peace out.
A very dear friend of mine recently received a diagnosis of vascular dementia. At 72, she is young, in terms of seniors and elders, and remains younger than her years in most ways.
I’m no stranger to dementia, and I’m not even completely blindsided by this, I have seen some signs. Yet this is a first for me in the very-close-friend-category.
How grateful I am that both she and I have tended to our personal growth over the years! She has called me her friend with benefits. Coaching benefits. ;-)
When I asked her what her greatest concern was about this, she did not hesitate: I’m scared about when the time comes that I don’t know who I am.
“It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.” ~ Terry Pratchett
I gently asked, if she didn’t know, why would it matter?
Oh, I would never trivialize the fear and anger one feels when faced with any kind of life changing news. But I knew she’d “get it”. She got quiet, breathed noticeably, and chuckled. “Oh, right”, she said.
She’s got a brilliant mind, picks up concepts quickly, and is more interested in transcending her conditioned thinking than anyone else I’ve ever known, present company included.
Navigating through the mysterious corridors of brain mis-fires will be an interesting journey with her. Certainly we will both feel a plethora of emotions, and we most certainly will allow each other to experience those feelings, yet with the confidence that all is well, all is divine, and that our lives are richer because we knew one another. And with the confidence that we will feel pain, and that pain will serve to bring us closer, to each other, to ourselves, to life itself.
“I can’t remember anything. Isn’t it peaceful?” ~ Byron Katie