2012.07.15 Planning End Times—Or Not

I’m taking a break from Israel because I need one for now. Too intense. Also, it’s Sunday—and in the simmering 90s, hotter than the hinges of hell they say. There is no hell and if there is it surely doesn’t have doors with hinges and knockers. 

I don’t think much about hell or heaven or death much—at all. Too intense and I feel too vital. But if I do I start to cry because I love life too much to die. 

Nevertheless, to be sensible, Dick & I made our first foray into planning ahead so our children won't have to make decisions for us when the time comes when we must live less independently.

We’d like to stay where we are as we age and we’ve picked out our hospital. City R us. 

A colleague wrote, Bravo to you both! She and her siblings had tried unsuccessfully to argue her parents out of retiring on one coast when all four kids were on the other. But........ “They had community and history, something that would have been missing in any of our four regions, and they could still come visit. So choosing a place that has other folk you like, if possible, is a solution that really has worked for them.  Now, of course, it means schlepping cross-country for each of us, repeatedly, but I suspect it's a fair price to pay for their contentedness.” 

So that’s our one plan. So what if we don’t have lots of friends here yet. No offspring has complained. Did we tell them all? At least none of them has to schlepp cross-country. Unless they move—their problem.  

So far I’m doing better than my mother, a must at all times. My sister and I had to make that nursing home decision for her. She acquiesced but......     I wished she’d planned or even said anything about it at all. Not a word, not  her style.

“So how is it here, Mom?” I finally asked imagining the worst.   “Oh, it’s not bad,” she said, then told me how she had a good woman friend. “Just my age. We sit in our wheelchairs and watch all the old men wobble by,” she laughed.

Mom didn’t seem fussed by the mushy tasteless food or the odors. She had no sense of smell, and doesn’t taste exit with that?  She actually seemed content.  Of course one of the staff let on that “Verbal abuse” was written all over her chart. 

The good thing about Mom was that she never made us feel guilty because she made a mockery of everything. She even showed off with pride all the Bingo prizes she’d won—a champ despite advancing macular degeneration.  I still have one of them, a little glass red heart. It’s so tacky I love it.

I urge planning ahead. It’s a control issue to laud. It’s also a loving thing to do. You’re also supposed to talk about all this with your children or someone.  All you need is a listening mutual conversation.

So far we’ve not talked about anything and have visited only that one place. 

2010.11.17 Profile in Courage

A woman recently told me a moving story—hers. It’s a story of mother/daughter love that comes from womb and know no bounds even when a painful relationship break happens.

Once upon a time a woman gave birth to a daughter, dearly beloved. Every day she loved this child with all her heart and did the best she could living with a difficult marriage and trying to manage her own decisions.

Every day the woman prepared meals for her daughter and other siblings, and every day the children ate well and grew up strong and healthy, until something began to go wrong. The daughter started the torturous route of addiction. It began slowly as it does with experimentation, adolescent stuff, maybe hanging out with friends that supported her growing habit rather than her health.

The mother’s response began slowly as it does with the usual parental warnings, hand wringings, and setting limits moving on to more desperate measures to try to control the uncontrollable. She offered advice, rescue and in time money, all good and obvious things to offer.

The daughter got sicker and sicker moving beyond alcohol. The drugs stole her personality, her sweetness, her intelligence, and her conscience. She became hard, unloving, a walled impenetrable brick house, containing terror.

The mother experienced about the same symptoms without the drugs—sick from worry, helplessness, grief, rage. All her way weren’t working to help her daughter. She didn’t stop loving her daughter.

The daughter was losing her life to addictions and the mother was losing her life to her daughter.

One day someone told the mother about AlAnon and she went. At meetings, as well as in therapy and with ongoing support from a steadfast and wise sister (not a nun sister) and her other children, the mother managed slowly to take back her own life and selfhood, which by now she had deeded to her daughter who occupied her mind,heart, soul, and body, leaving no room for herself.

The mother started to love herself as much as she loved her daughter. Years passed. The mother got well but couldn’t quite get the lost daughter off her mind. She wasn’t free.

It happened one day. It happened inspirationally. It happened because of a community of support and because of the grace of what 12-step recovery programs call Higher Power and some people call God, Buddha, Jesus, Allah,Universe, and many other names, all meaning Loving Mystery.

We pray for a rescuer and we got a lover.

Such Love has power in impotence. How odd. The woman connected with her own internal power fueled by her love for her daughter and drove unannounced to her daughter’s house where she encountered a cold hard woman she hardly could recognize, a woman facing a trial and a prison sentence, a much bigger limitation than her mother could ever manage.

Neither God nor mothers are very good jailers.

The woman made a simple statement to her daughter, one that told the daughter about her hurt. She told her “It hurts when........”

She didn’t tell her daughter “You hurt me when you......” The difference in language is subtle but the honest message is the same.

The mother told her daughter she had come to say good bye. I can’t imagine a more painful moment.

She also told the daughter she always had and always would love her.

Then she left. The door closed behind her and she drove away feeling free and weeping, the kind of tears you cry when you have labored long and finally a child pushes through to grab her own separate life. The umbilicus is severed usually by a doctor. This mother had to sever her own to give birth to herself.

Love, human or divine, is never severed however. Its power takes a long long slow time but one day it will show up.

Maybe, as it did for St. Paul, in jail .