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| Mom and me, October 31st, 2019 |
At 93, the Alzheimer's is claiming more and more of her capacity to be present. Sometimes I'll be sitting with my mother at the dining table helping her to eat her meal and will ask her a simple question. We'll be looking right at each other and... nothing, no answer. While this doesn't happen all the time, it is happening more frequently.
I've also been witnessing her growing exhaustion. Where just last year we were going outside to enjoy the garden area through so much of the year, it is now rare that my mother will have the energy to take even a brief walk outside. Then, just just over a week ago, the scariest and saddest time occurred when I arrived to take Mom to the dining room for lunch. Her caregiver gave me a heads up that she hadn't really eaten breakfast because it had been so hard to wake her up. I've always been able to feed my mom okay and eating in the dining room rather than being fed in her room, as normally happens now when I'm not there, seems like one more way to get my mother out and more stimulated. So we headed down to eat with others. And my heart was breaking. I sat there wanting to cry as I did everything I could to wake my mother up and feed her. She was totally unaware of being around others and kept drifting off as I massaged her arm, kissed her forehead and her cheek, gently moved her body, and asked her to open her mouth for another bite. For the first time, I was barely able to feed my mom, and taking her to the dining room felt not helpful at all...
And I never know. Is this it? Is this when she won't rebound back? Will she be able to appreciate being with me and around others in the dining room when I come next time? Or is this when she's going to regularly stop eating without persistent prompts and encouragement? Will she continue to spiral? Will she die tonight? Or will tomorrow be different — a return to increased engagement and her capacity to do the most basic requirements for living, such as eating? I simply never know what I will walk into each time I arrive at Glenwood Place. And I never know when the phone call will come that my mom is dying or has passed.
Meanwhile, I'm grateful for each day. I'm grateful for the touch of my mom and what it's like to gaze into each other's eyes. I'm grateful for kisses and smiles and hugs and holding hands. I'm grateful that my mother has rebounded and has lucid moments in which she is deeply present. I'm grateful that she has broken out of the debilitating prison of her mental illness for over six years now. I'm grateful for the miracle of every loving moment that we have shared since her first move here in May of 2013. I'm also grateful for the hospice referral and the added support for my mom and me and our family. And I'm grateful that I am able to experience both gratitude and grief. All such profound gifts.
*****
Every time that I am moved to write, I am aware that ripples are created and that any story that I may tell is much larger than me. As I am mindful of my experience of growing grief around the losses related to my mother, the losses related to this beautiful hurting world that we share, and more, I am moved to share these excerpts from the newest book that I am reading, The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. This little book has been an additional soothing balm for my heart and soul. The gifts of Grace which I have discovered here resonate deeply with my own personal journey from a once wounded and walled up young woman who could not grieve to the awakening, loving, compassionate, and evolving human being I am blessed with being today. This apprenticeship with sorrow has taught me both how to grieve and the consciousness of the great gifts that are held in opening to and embracing the full range of our individual and collective human experiences.
These gifts are also reflected in poet Mary Oliver's wise words:
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Given that grief is such an intimate part of being human, it is my hope that these messages may also be helpful to all who read them.
*****
From the Forward by Michael Lerner:
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief brings together Weller's wisdom from decades of work with grief and loss.
I'm not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life...There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief....
Every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. We must learn the art and craft of grief, discover the profound ways it ripens and deepens us. While grief is an intense emotion, it is also a skill we develop through a prolonged walk with loss. Facing grief is hard work... It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. This is precisely what we are being called to do....
One of Weller's most original contributions is his delineation of the five "gates of grief."
The first gate he simply describes as everything we love, we will lose. The book is rich in discerning quotations, and here he quotes a twelfth-century poem:
'Tis a fearful thing
To love
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,
and oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing
to love what death can touch.
This first gate is known to us all. This second gate surprises us: the places that have not known love. This is, to my mind, original and important. Weller writes:
These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives... These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair... The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth.
The third gate of grief is the sorrows of the world... Grief at the suffering of the world has long been known as a fundamental human dilemma. Suffering exists is the first noble truth of the Buddha. How to face suffering is at the heart of the great religious and philosophical traditions.
"The cumulative grief of the world is overwhelming... How can we possibly stay open to the endless assaults on the biosphere?," Weller asks. He then quotes Naomi Nye's beautiful lines:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know the sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Weller's fourth gate is what we expected and did not receive.
Again, this is, to me, an original observation. "Deep in our bones lies an old intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community... In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment... Hidden within the losses at this gate lies our diminished experience of who we truly are."
Weller calls the fifth gate ancestral grief. "This is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors... Tending this undigested grief of our ancestors not only frees us to live our own lives but also eases ancestral suffering in the other world."
These gates offer us a way of acknowledging the many ways sorrow enters our lives. In this way, we are able to honor and heal the inevitable times of loss we each will face. Weller's gift lies in bringing soul and community to places that are often met with denial or fear. This helps free us from facing our loss in isolation. The Cancer Help Program is founded on this deep truth: we heal in community.
Wherever you find yourself on the path of sorrow, Weller will be a worthy companion. For the simple truth is that great loss is wasted if we do not use it, over time, to discover what lies beyond great loss. For this, Weller quotes the great naturalist and essayist Terry Tempest Williams:
Grief dares us to love once more.
— Michael Lerner
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