The "A" word

Over the past few years assorted doctors have described my mother's mental decline as cognitive deficit, senile dementia and cortical shrinkage. Since I was not present to hear exactly what her doctors said, all I heard was my mother's version which was she did not have Parkinson's. Well, what she actually said was " I don't have that problem that begins with a P". Alzheimer's has been mentioned in passing but no formal declaration was ever made to me. I was under the impression that Alzheimer's was a premature senility developing when a person was in their fifties or early sixties. The diagnosis of Alzheimer's now includes the senility of the very old too.

There has been a noticeable decline in Mother's mental functioning in the past few weeks which has been worrisome to me. I finally mustered up the guts to look up the seven stages of Alzheimer's. I knew what the end could be like; however I just wanted an idea of how far along she was. She is a textbook case and has moved into stage 6. Some days she is remarkably lucid but other days I can't figure out what she wants to tell me. We've even resorted to a kind of sign language at times. Bless her heart, she works so very hard to figure out the day and month. I imagine the time will come when it becomes too great of an effort. It's really hard to say that my mother has Alzheimer's, but I sure as heck don't know what else to call it. I guess it will become easier the more I say it. One can hope.

Soaking up the sun

After years of dire warnings in regards to sun exposure, there are increasing reports coming from the scientific community that sunshine is really very good for us. The Vitamin D Council has been publishing some tremendously exciting information about the sunshine vitamin and its benefit for fighting infection, cancer and depression. It appears that the zealous use of sun blocks is a factor in vitamin D deficiency. Also old people and the mentally ill don't go out much and thus are frequently seriously lacking this essential vitamin. Just getting people outside in the sun can be extremely therapeutic.

And how nice was to have a really excellent reason to bask in the spring sunshine over the weekend! I took several long walks in the woods and enjoyed sitting out on the deck reading Anne Lamott's latest book. I also drove my Jeep up a rocky cow path (now that was cool!), parked and hiked with the Hubster through a swampy woods to check out a heron rookery. He said he's counted seventy nests in the area. We must have seen thirty nesting great blue herons. It was a thrilling sight. We walked back to the car through a field thinking it would be easier going than the swampy woods but the field was marshy too. Still it was a wonderful outing. And we got a big dose of vitamin D.

I do still use sun screen if I'm at risk of getting seriously sunburned, like when I went for a three hour afternoon sail on Lake Michigan last summer. But I now avoid using moisturizer and any makeup with sun screen, so I can soak up all the beneficial rays I can on a daily basis.

Sparkle

Sparkle has recently become a running joke between me and my training analyst. Not long ago he commented to me that I don't have to sparkle at everything. Blog entries don't have to sparkle with wit and brilliance. The meals I prepare can just be simple and nutritious rather than taste sensations. When I interact with others, my engaged presence is enough and that I don't have to leave them dazzled. There must be some crazy internal sparkle index by which I rate my performance.

In truth, not needing to sparkle is a tremendous relief. I suspect I kicked in the sparkle gear as a kid to get some response from a depressed mother and a preoccupied father. I became the generator of the interactions with them. No sparkle, no response. In retrospect, this is very sad. Unless I sparkled I didn't feel neat. This explains a deep down fear that if I do not sparkle, I will bore people and they will not want to be around me. Who wants to hang around someone who doesn't sparkle? Sparkle people are fun and entertaining. Sparkle people can sing, dance, tell delightful stories and flash their dimples. Man, what a heavy load it is to be responsible for cheering up, entertaining, informing and brightening up the entire world!

Today I hereby officially tender my resignation as a designated sparkler and return responsibility to others for their own entertainment, joy and satisfaction. Amen!

Blog fog part 2

Yesterday I found myself thinking a lot about wisdom. In consulting Wikipedia, I realized wisdom is a lot of different things to a lot of people. My search of Wikiquote proved far more enlightening, but it is curious that there is just one quotation from the Bible. The books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, attributed to King Solomon, were written primarily to teach the ways of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Solomon tells his son. If you are the god of your own universe, you're not wise. If you want to be wise, don't hang with losers. Be careful who you chose for friends and don't let passions rule your life. Be disciplined. Lay a good foundation in your youth and you will have the wherewith all to face the inevitable sorrows life brings. Good basic stuff.

I read Ecclesiastes all the way through for the first time in my thirties. Then I was preparing to be a deacon in my church and was required to read the entire Bible in a two year cycle. At that time I found the words of Solomon written at the end of his life very depressing. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity he drones. All the things we humans think are important, old Solomon declares are nothing more than vanity. When I reread Ecclesiastes in my forties, it was less of an ordeal. By the time, I reached my fifties, by golly Solomon was right on target. The following verse has been helpful to me: Ecclesiastes Chapter 5, verses 19-20. As an aside, my father-in-law's birthday was 5/19 and he was a pretty wise man.

"It is a gift of God that every man to whom he has granted wealth and
riches and the power to enjoy them should accept his lot and rejoice
in his labor. He will not dwell overmuch upon his passing years; for
God fills his time with joy of heart."

Blog Fog

I get intimidated by reading other people's blogs. Some people are so witty or at least they find clever interesting things to post. Maybe they know more clever interesting people than I. Some people have great impassioned, clear cut opinions. I'm still trying to figure out what mine are. I read the daily newsfeeds from both NPR and Fox if this gives any indication. I figure something resembling the truth may reside somewhere in between. But I am unable to give a really informed opinion about much of anything. I am so aware of my ignorance.

I don't travel that much, so I don't have pictures to post of me standing in front of famous landmarks or beautiful places. Hmm, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

My kids are grown, I don't have adorable grandchildren and my dog is a dedicated slug so there aren't many cute stories to blog. Well my kids are still very adorable but they are big enough to have their own blogs now. They've been misquoted by me long enough.

About all I can do is share some stories about the people I meet and perhaps recommend some music or books that I feel are worthwhile. In the past nine months, I've been taking a crash course on the world of the very old. I needed this course to be sure but it's frequently very redundant, messy, exasperating and just plain strange. It's certainly not what I expected when I invited my mother to move here. I had some notion that we'd have heart to heart talks about the meaning of life and I'd glean some great insights from sitting at her feet. Well, that illusion hit the dust when I found not wisdom but deeply entrenched reflexive patterns. To gain wisdom, one must actively seek it and she never did. But I have learned a lot about me and that a lot of my dorkiness was copied directly from my mother. That's been most valuable to learn and quite useful to teach.

Measuring success

My line of work entails a great deal of patience, more patience than I ever thought I would possess. One man's progress has been slower than a snail's pace and at times seems to be making none whatsoever. Yet week after week, his Mom and Dad drive him to my office and pay for his hour. I figure, they must be seeing some improvement. Each time, he starts out with "It's not been a very good week"; however in the middle of the apparent monotony of his life, there are little glimmers of light which are very small but significant indicators that change is indeed occurring.

Last fall he went into a new big box emporium a few weeks after it opened. "So what?" you might say. Considering it took him six years before he mustered up the courage to go into the old big box emporium that this new one replaced, this was a real milestone.

Not long ago he started off with his usual opening line and then began telling me about riding his bike all over town. One morning, he rode over to the grocery store, went in, bought some donuts and bananas, and rode home. He did all of this by himself and in broad daylight. I've been having him walk several times a day, but he typically walks very early in the morning or in the evening. He doesn't like to run into people because he thinks others look down on him for living at home. He has trouble with social interactions in general. Going into any store without Mom and Dad is a recent accomplishment and getting there on his own speed during daylight is nigh on miraculous.

I commented "You couldn't have done that three years ago". He agreed. "Why you couldn't have done that last year, could you?" No he couldn't have. He smiled when I told him that this was quite an accomplishment. And it truly was.

Football injury and sheds

It was an absolutely gorgeous day last Friday, so I took the 5 year old little boy outside. We played football in the parking lot behind my office. Over the years my arm has developed and I can usually throw the ball so it will softly hit any kid's midsection. Now this kid threw wild balls, as far and as hard as he could. I taught him how to catch the ball and from then on he didn't miss a one I threw his way. I didn't catch any because they were either way wide or way over my head. So I ran a lot. We talked, laughed and goofed around the way you do with 5 year old little boys.

The next morning I awoke with a sore tailbone. It hurt to sit down. It hurt to stand up. It hurt to bend over. The only unusual activity I had done was play football. By day two, the pain was far less and today it is gone. Next week I'll get out the legos.

I learned a new term yesterday. A young lady came to the door wanting to know if she could look for sheds. Well we have two sheds, but why she wanted to look for sheds was beyond me. Hubster came to the door and told her he didn't know where any were but she could go look. I was still in the dark. I asked him what it was she wanted. He replied that she was looking for sheds. Seeing my confusion, he explained that sheds were the antlers which deer had shed. Oh, now I see. You can tell I grew up in the city.

Small talk

One thing I've noticed that's happened since I began analytic training is I have gradually lost any proficiency in small talk. I am amazed to listen to the banter of others who can enter into impassioned, intelligent and often witty exchanges about movies, books, social issues or politics. For a while I could shift gears from real talk to social talk. I can't anymore. It seems what I bring to the table often is a big social bomb that abruptly brings an end to that topic of conversation. My working world is filled with a lot of tragedy and such topics don't make good small talk.

This week there seemed to be a lot of sadness. Was I running an unadvertised special for broken hearts? For every one of the wounded souls I saw, there was an underlying early trauma that today's broken relationship tapped in to. One man carried a torch for years for a married woman. He kept waiting around in the wings. When the woman's marriage finally broke up, he thought he might finally have her. When she let him know that this would never happen, he was devastated. I knew that she represented his mom. He had wanted to help her in the way he couldn't help his mom who slipped into a depression after she and his dad divorced. He was weeping simultaneously for the lost love of 2007 and for the lost love of 1971. Loss=loss. Another woman was removed from her birth family as a small girl. She was placed in an orphanage and then in a series of foster homes. When she was dumped by her boyfriend, all the old themes of rejection, of nobody wanting her and of hopelessness surfaced with a vengeance.

The experience of childhood hospitalization is a loss that is frequently revived by romantic breakup. From a kid point of view, the child is abandoned in the hospital (in those days when moms and dads weren't encouraged to stay over with their child). Not only abandoned but frequently tortured by medical interventions.

I just started reading The Last Street Before Cleveland by Joe Mackell who is an English professor at Ashland College. In the opening chapters he writes of visiting the grave of his childhood friend Tom in their hometown of Parma Ohio. He had not been home since shortly after his mother's death. His mother died at age 44. In the opening chapter, Joe goes to the cemetery to see where Tom is buried. It is also where Joe's mom is buried. Joe is now 44. It no coincidence that he finally chooses to go home at this time. He might believe he's there simply because of Tom. He has not ever visited his mother's grave. In coming to the cemetery he is certainly circling in closer to facing this heartbreaking loss.

This is the stuff that interests me. It's the stuff I think about. But alas, it doesn't make for sparkling small talk.

Kind-ness

From the blog "Don't Eat Alone";

Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle

When I searched some data bases for a good image to post with this quotation from Philo of Alexandria, I typed in "kind" and came up with pictures of children from German sources. I was puzzled at first and then remembered that the German word for child is kind. I rather liked the double meaning.