I google their names, the people I knew in my past — poets, painters, psychologists who kept my psyche stirred, my shadows swirling through radiant darkness; dancers who swept me across ballrooms and turned my nights starry, my limbs light and fair. Do they ever google me and remember?
Even in dark corners, good things grow.
I read this article in the NY Times by Bob Herbert and am almost overwhelmed by the clouds of darkness with which the GOP has shrouded the minds of so many of my countrymen and countrywomen.
Herbert writes:
The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship.
The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or whether gays should be allowed to marry, they’re not calling the G.O.P. to account for (to take just one example) the horribly destructive policy of cutting taxes while the nation was fighting two wars.
If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.
The are dark times. Depressed and depressing times.
But then I read this article, also in the Times, and see a brighter side — small, still. But we are due for a new season of enlightenment in our nation’s political world.
David Leonhardt reminds us that
The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.
[snip]
The bill is the most sweeping piece of federal legislation since Medicare was passed in 1965. It aims to smooth out one of the roughest edges in American society — the inability of many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. And it would do so in large measure by taxing the rich.
[snip]
Above all, the central question that both the Reagan and Obama administrations have tried to answer — what is the proper balance between the market and the government? — remains unresolved. But the bill signed on Tuesday certainly shifts our place on that spectrum.
While I am not a Christian, I can’t help but wonder how a U.S. Senator Jesus Christ would have voted on the issue of universal health care.
I’m Ronni’s guest blogger today at Time Goes By, as she spends a couple of weeks in NYC at work and play, including participating in the Age Boom Academy.
From an 04/02/09 Time magazine editorial:
For the past several years, I’ve been harboring a fantasy, a last political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to life’s exit ramp. In this case, I mean the high-minded part literally. And so, a deal: give us drugs, after a certain age – say, 80 – all drugs, any drugs we want. In return, we will give you our driver’s licenses. (I mean, can you imagine how terrifying a nation of decrepit, solipsistic 90-year-old boomers behind the wheel would be?) We’ll let you proceed with your lives – much of which will be spent paying for our retirement, in any case – without having to hear us complain about our every ache and reflux. We’ll be too busy exploring altered states of consciousness. I even have a slogan for the campaign: “Tune in, turn on, drop dead.”
Read the whole piece here. and go over the TGB to get my take on it.
I am struck tonight by the power of other persons’ words.
Oh, I know, this web is a world of words. I spend too many hours meandering among miles of words that escape my head and ignore my heart.
Ronni Bennett’s Time Goes By is the one blog I read every day because what she has to say always has relevance for me. And so I don’t know how I managed NOT to read an incredibly moving section of her blog until tonight. And it is a section that has deep meaning for me because it’s about her time being her dying mother’s caregiver.
“A Mother’s Last Best Lesson” is presented in 12 poignantly honest pieces that hold the mind and touch the heart.
It’s not that I identify with Ronni’s experience; my attempts to take care of my mother have been very different. But she tells a powerful story, and there is something in me that is jarred by her revealing words.
There is something in me that resents not being able to do for my mother what Ronni did for hers. Oh yes, our circumstances are very different. Dementia makes it so. As does, in my case, situations of brutal familial disputes over how my mother’s care should be handled. I couldn’t win, so I abdicated because I have no legal power to make her struggle any easier, and I couldn’t bear to just stand by.
Ronni’s story made me realize that, after 8 years of caregiving being the intense focal point of my existence, I now find I don’t have a point, a purpose. I can get up in the morning, or not. I can eat, or not. Bathe or not. Go out or not.
I am finally “retired” from employment and living with a loving family and an almost-7-year old engaging grandson who is a joy. But I have forgotten how to be engaged in my own so-called life.
I am feeling like a work in progress that has had no progress for 8 years. In my past life I raised a family; held various challenging and rewarding jobs; was an vocal activist on behalf of various political and educational issues; and found power in the poetry of women’s spirituality. And I wrote. And I wrote. I was passionate about everything I did; if I didn’t feel passionate about it, I didn’t do it.
I have found myself in a “dark night of the soul” before and have labored, successfully, to find my way out, one step at a time.
Next week I am going on a week’s vacation to Maine with two of my closest friends. We will play Boggle and drink wine and laugh a lot. We will walk on the beach and read and contemplate and talk and laugh a lot.
And when I come back home, I will begin yet another journey to find the parts of myself that I have lost, to regenerate the parts of myself that have lost passion and purpose. I think I have found a new counselor who might be able to help me with that process.
Over the course of some 20 years of my previous life, I had the good fortune to have had as a friend and counselor someone who has moved on to assisting veterans and their families as they reconnect and readjust into full, productive civilian life.
He was a poet before he was a therapist, and his work and his words, now, still hold a great deal of healing power.
The word psychotherapist comes directly from the Asclepiad tradition. It means “soul attendant.” Psychology literally means “the order and meaning of the soul.” It didn’t become a science until Freud and his followers arrived out of the medical tradition. Modern psychology left the soul far behind and has not yet reconnected with its spiritual roots, though it needs to, because psychological healing occurs at a spiritual level.
The above is from an interview in The Sun magazine on helping veterans with PTSD, entitled Like Wandering Ghosts: Edward Tick On How The U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers. It’s worth a read.
Entropy is a term used to define (among other things), a process of deterioration of a system.
In terms of technology, my life seems to be one big process of entropy. My old desktop died a slow death over the past several months. Last week, I totally fried the new laptop that I inherited from my once husband. (That frakkin’ Vista!) Now I’m on a old little laptop that does not hold the wifi settings that I need to get online. It’s only a matter of time with this machine as well. How do you end entropy?
I think the first thing for me to do is cut my losses. and not spend any more time and money trying to fix messes of machinery that have aready joined the slide into infinite entropy.
I have to start over, with an inexpensive CPU with XP that can keep me online. If I ever have enough money to get a new laptop, it will be a Mac. That’s a big IF.
And then there’s my mother, whom I somehow have to rescue from the entropy of her care by my brother. I’m leaving tomorrow, driving into what I know will be a battleground for what’s left of my 93 year old mother’s demented life. She deserves better than she’s getting.
She fell yesterday, and the doctor wanted her to go to the emergency room, but that didn’t happen. I want to take her there when I arrive tomorrow. It could wind up a fierce and legal battle if things do not change to her benefit.
Took a sleeping pill to calm me dowm.
TOMORROW’S ANOTHER BATTLE FOR FREEDOM AND INTEGRITY AND SELFLESSNESS.
Last night, as I sifted through some of my earlier poetry, I remembered just how therapeutic writing it was at the time. I was so young, unprepared for the realities of husband and child/children. And I married someone as unprepared as I. He dealt with it all through multi-media productions of his original scripts. I would sit in the audience and watch the characters he created speak to our relationship more poignantly than his face-to-face words ever did.
I’m not sure I ever showed him the poems I wrote as I slowly felt my own self lost in the wake of his magnificent obsession. I’m sure there were many young women like me. Some went mad. Some got mad.
I am no Sylvia Plath. These are not great poems. But they were, and are, an essential part of my story.
I await the unexpected,
the unsought.
My life is a contradiction.
When the goal is set,
when conscious action
strips away the dream,
I turn off.
Because I am
(why?)
a patterned person,
I am surrounded, bound, bonded.
I don’t need any more directions to go
or any more goals to touch.
I wish I were the wind.
Change is what I
wear at the edge
(where I have the best perspective)
waiting for familiar whims
to coax me into shape
and coast me down
the deepening dayslide.
Essentially, I am
not.
Medusa, I
am stoned on my own reflection.
Words curl straight
from the hurt in my head
forming questions,
marked and mumbled
under a heavy heartless hum.
Pan (Peter), I
cling to the rings
of endless adolescence,
hanging tight
as the merry goes round
Zelda, I
run screaming
toward the dark and gathered things
that claw at the threshold
of darkest dreams
and dive naked and dancing
into the fountained pool
behind my eyes.
No, this is not some kind of rant about that political football.
This is about my family (of origin) and how we deal with each other, the value we place on each other and on ourselves.
As I was growing up, “love” was equated with money. My parents showed they loved us by buying us things. I never refused any of their “love.” It’s all I knew, and I grew to love “things.” Until I immersed by self in therapy — years after a lot of damage was done.
I have a sibling. We have become about as opposite as two offspring from the same parents could be. Maybe because he never dealt with those warped family values.
And now I find that I am going to have to battle him for control of my mother’s assets and for her guardianship. She (93 years old with dementia) is in his care, and he doesn’t know how to care. I can’t bring her to live with me here at my daughter’s, and after the last eight years taking care of her, I need to take care of my own health and well-being.
I have avoided visiting my mother and brother for almost a month because he treats me so awfully. And I can’t stand watching how he treats her. When I go there, I wash her up so that she doesn’t smell, I change her sheets, her clothes, wash her hair. I dance with her each night before she goes to sleep. I make sure she takes her meds and eats nourishing food. I am tired, but she is being treated abusively when I’m not there.
He can use her assets to bring in professional help to take care of her. He won’t.
I feel angry and stupid and tired. I wonder where that “Kali” part of me went. I need to find that part of me to help me win the battle ahead.
I am going to be 69 in a few days. I think I need some Geritol.
It never fails, and I’ve been through it after every move (I’ve moved four times in the last 20 year.) Every time I get rid of clothing items, within a month I wish I had kept them. It doesn’t help that I’m addicted to buying clothes, and so downsizing becomes a periodic trauma.
I’m going to have to downsize my wardrobe considerably in order to fit in my rooms at my daughter’s house. I have already spent a month agonizing over what to get rid of. I’ve taken car loads to the Salvation Army and will be taking another trip tomorrow.
I used to say that I would have no problem taking off and leaving everything behind except my car, my computer and my cat. Obviously something has changed.
I think that the difference is that, back then, I had a life that I enjoyed and the energy to keep living it no matter where I was. Now I have neither. I just have a lot of stuff.
That’s the question she asked as she finally sat up in bed somewhere close to noon today. Usually she asks “Where am I?” Obviously, her dementia has gotten worse.
I tell her her name, in Polish, in English, her maiden name, her married name. By then she’s onto her other worry — “Can I go home now?”
It’s night now. I was with her most of the day, since my brother had a dentist appointment. When I’m with her, I try to respond with care to every question, every mood, every demand. After all, her world must be truly terrifying. And I’m her anchor.
Except she’s my anchor as well. I can’t move beyond her peripheral vision, or she panics. She is downstairs now with my brother, banging her cane on the floor and calling for me. My contact at the Alzheimer’s Association local chapter tells me that it’s not unusual for dementia patients to latch on to the most trusted caregiver and constantly shadow them. That’s what she’s doing, and it’s making me crazy.
I am holed up in my room, television blasting so that I don’t have to hear her distress. I am eating cherries and chocolate chip cookies. My stomach is in knots.
Meds only seem to make her worse in other ways. She needs 24 hour care, and it’s become too much for two people. But my brother wants her with him.
And I want to get away from this whole situation, even though she pleads with me: “Take me with you.”
It’s beautiful here on the mountain. But it’s also a prison, especially for her.
“Where are the streets?” she asks. “Where are the families?” she wonders as she looks out the window at the lush trees and patches of blue sky.
It’s hard to take her anywhere because she needs a toilet nearby. And her mood can go from placid to panic in a heartbeat.
She has lived too long. I hope that I am not still alive at 92. Or if I am, I still have my mind and my sense of humor.
Meanwhile, I’m sorting through all the stuff I brought with me to this place and downsizing. And packing.