My sister and I are having a wonderful experience with the Magic Eye calendar for 2020.
We meet via a video call on the first day of each month and we turn the page together. We love the sharing: looking; not seeing; relaxing; looking again; seeing. That is how the process works!
September was a very challenging image to see. We both had to make at least a half-dozen attempts.
Relaxing is key.
Our collective exhilaration when we finally see is palpable.
My writing time with Southern Circle Poets began with someone’s post about “Ambiguous Loss” that I had re-posted on Facebook:
Someone once said when you love someone with dementia you lose them more and more everyday: when they are diagnosed, when they go through different stages, when they go into care and when they die.
This is called “Ambiguous Loss.”
‘Rapidly shrinking brain’ is how doctors described it.
I wouldn’t wish Dementia on anyone. As the persons brain slowly dies, they change physically and eventually forget who their loved ones are. They can eventually become bedridden, unable to move and unable to eat or drink.
There will be people who will scroll by this message because dementia has not touched them. They may not know what it’s like to have a loved one who has fought or is fighting a battle against Dementia.
My friend, Claudia, knows this experience well, as does Katey, one of the Southern Circle Poets.
I wrote:
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I cannot expect you to understand what it feels like to see someone struggle with tasks that once were as easy as breathing. To hear a loved-one say or ask the same comment or question over and over again.
And to know the truth, “I cannot fix this.”
Being present with my own inner struggles with wanting it to be fixed is the best I can do.
I begin a poem:
You Once Were
You once were so skillful; and willful.
You once were so strong.
The writing doesn’t go anywhere from there, so I begin again…
Ambiguous Loss
I wonder when I first recognized you were losing precious skills we had both taken for granted. Like scales falling off the catch-of-the-day, your identity seems to be hell-bent on shedding strengths.
Crossing the street as the afternoon sunlight was casting shadows, I saw autumn trees on the face of the glistening parking lot still damp from a brief shower. This the first time I had accepted it was me cautioning you to watch your step. Red, yellow, orange and gold…. green now sleeping soundly somewhere.
I cannot see your world from here.
Permission granted to enjoy the hint of fall as the breeze blows in from the window behind me, almost cool enough to cause a chill.
Permission granted to witness the tightness moving mechanically across my chest as I wonder what your future will unfold to.
Permission granted to be content with both the not knowing and the wanting to know and the soft, sensuous dance between seeming opposites.
Memory drifts back to delivering my mom to the adult foster care home. Grief at leaving her there as she looks into my face calling me Debbie, and pleads, “Don’t leave me with these strangers….” and the guilt at being my relief to be leaving her there. The years of her decline, the day of her passing—edges blur as they burn a hole in my emotional body, a single heart breaking open enough to hold the whole human happening.
Profound gratitude now for the dear ones who have walked this path previously, providing a trail of recognition along this treacherous terrain. Remembering Hansel and Gretel and their crumbs of bread being consumed by the birds….
I make the choice to trust I am still moving toward the center of our being.
This morning I had a near-identical conversation with two people I love. One was about the news that a job would be ending. The other was about having been at an eye doctor’s office with frighteningly lax procedures for prevention of the spread of Covid-19. Although the content of these two experiences looks dissimilar, the words that came crossed the chasm of delusion: Every experience will be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We learn from it all.
I said, “When you have already already felt the pain of the experience, be sure you reap the benefits.”
Having worked at jobs which demanded so much that life balance was sacrificed isn’t failure. Noticing is gaining insight.
When a child is burned by touching a hot stove, the child learns from the pain how to be safer.
Now, this is “Ambiguous Gain…”
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