Where Love meets Alzheimer's in "FEEDING MY MOTHER" by Jann Arden

 

Another year, another page.

a million moments melt away.

The ticking-tocking hands of time,

what’s found and lost, remains sublime.

The details that we hold so fast,

are nothing more than memories past.

For love is all that lingers true,

the bond that ties my heart to you.

—JANN ARDEN, DECEMBER 29, 2013

These days, I am doing more puzzling and less reading and writing.  There is one big reason for that.  The jigsaw puzzles that I have been doing are beautiful and lack a conflicting presence in my life.  Most of the books I've been reading in the last few years have been great for me, but are turning the rest of my world upside down.  I can share the pictures of my jigsaw puzzles with my family but sharing my literary discoveries.. well... that is a different story.  

"Gratitude is a way to belong to the universe, a way to attach yourself to everything that ever existed. When grace and thanks and mercy fill your days, you can survive all hardship. You can conquer any wrongs, and you can help others to do the same. Gratitude is my cape, my superhero “must-have” to get me through life. Gratitude helps me to understand my parents and my shortcomings and my failures and my triumphs.

It has changed who I am and how I react to things. Without this magical energy in my life, I feel lost. There have been times when I didn’t understand how much I took things for granted, and my whole being felt the effects of that negativity. I do not want to walk into the sunset anymore, I want to run into the sunrise. " JA

Jann Arden's book is a story I can talk about with my family.  My husband remembers running sound for Jann back in Calgary before "Insensitive" hit the airwaves.  But it wasn't her music that drew me to her story... it was her journey with her parents and their Dementia that had me downloading this book after I thought I had given up on reading.  

Mom started laughing when I asked her why she was saving all this crap. She said, “I just need it and I don’t know why. So there. You can burn it all when I die.” JA

I think what I loved most about the book were two things.  Jann's conversations with her mom and her wisdom that came out of those interactions.  From the looks of this last quote... it seems like we have very similar mothers.  

 Lift others up when you can, even if you don’t agree with what they have to say. Don’t always turn your words into weapons when you can just as easily make them doves.  JA

Jann's book is a perfect mix of wit and wisdom.  Those reads are hard to find.  I think I want to spend less time talking about what I got out of the book... and just share those wise words from Jann herself.  Because there were so many.  

It’s okay to feel sadness. I don’t mind it lingering there like smoke. It serves as a reminder that I am able to feel things and be present in my own life, a participant rather than an observer. Life isn’t a beer commercial. You can’t run down a sunlit beach every day. If you ask me, that would become tedious. Obstacles and challenges simply make you stronger and smarter and more authentic.

And my sadness is not depression. I’m not depressed, I’m sad. Two very different things. I know why I’m sad. It isn’t a mystery. I don’t want or need a pill or a drink or a salve or some sort of magic tonic to make it go away. I am quite happy to feel sad. JA

A woman after my own heart.  

What I’ve come to understand, through a great deal of my own anguish and heartache and sadness, is that memories DO NOT define our souls. Our souls—my mother’s soul, and all the souls who are bombarded with memory loss—are intact.

I’ve been trying, but I can’t begin to tell you what I have learned about myself and my mom during this unfortunate but, in its way, glorious journey. I knew my mom was strong and resilient but I had no idea how strong, how resilient. She said to me once, after one of my rants where I tried to be the memory police a few years ago, that a person didn’t have to remember everything in order to be happy. That, as you can imagine, kind of blew my mind for the following several weeks.

“You don’t have to remember everything to be happy.”  JA

I think the greatest lesson I learned from Jann's story is about the memory police.  Why do we have to be the memory police?    Do I really have to correct another person just because I think they have their facts wrong?  Alzheimer's intensifies fantasies, but fantasies are a part of every day life for most people.  And one person's fantasy is another person's reality.  So why do I need to infringe my reality into what I perceive as another person's fantasy, which they only see as their reality.  This has been a great lesson for me and one I hope I can implement in my own life more.  Thanks Jann!

We shouldn’t judge a human life by how it ends, and we so often do. How we die has nothing to do with how we lived. I think I’ve been confusing these two things. I’ve been making her whole life about these past few years and that’s not where the truth lies. JA

Oh boy... it just kept getting better and better.  

I believe with all my heart that love permeates Alzheimer’s. It gets through even though you think it’s not getting through. It’s like a shard of light that even a blind person can see. Love will surprise you at every turn. JA

My Oma forgot my name in the last couple years of her life, but she never forgot that she loved me.  Alzheimer's and Dementia take the brain, but they have no access to the love.  I have seen love and fear manifested in patients with Dementia... I wonder if it a choice.  If we can pour love into our lives and into the lives of others... that has to be the best way to navigate the Alzheimer's journey.  The memories will be lost... but we can do everything to see that the Love remains.  Because... Love drives out Fear!

Thank you Jann for sharing your story and being vulnerable in the process.  If this is the last book I ever read, it will be a crowning jewel in my library.  

And because I am posting this on the first Sunday of Advent... Jann's greeting seems an appropriate send off...

MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY HANUKKAH!

Whatever your beliefs be, I hope goodness is at the heart of them all. JA

My Unfinished Reads still matter

These days, I haven't spent much time reading.  Most of my hours are spent assembling jigsaw puzzles.  It is my new time consumer.  I started a new book today, hoping that this one will find completion and a place in my rocket reads.  I have amassed quite a few reads that haven't made it to completion. I can think of a few reasons I didn't cross the finish line with them.  

1. I lost interest with the content

2. I got the message in the first few chapters and the remaining content seemed to be redundant.

3. I felt guilty for investing time in the content. 

4. The read wasn't what I had anticipated. 

5. I found that the material was already covered in previous books.  

6. I started reading another book more captivating.

7. My short attention span wins out.  

8. My eyes got tired. 

9. My brain got tired. 

10. The finish line was just too far away. 

So many possibilities.  This morning I thought of going into my unfinished reads and pulling out some quotes to share.  Just because I didn't finish the book, doesn't mean some wisdom wasn't gleaned.  I must have found something worth sharing before I abandoned the book.    

Let's see what I can find... 

"The Knowledge Seeker" Blair Stonechild

"In the Indigenous world view, all Creation is sacred and spiritually alive. As one Elder described it, once a person set foot outside his lodge, the entire world was his church. Land is a living entity that must be treated with respect. Spirituality is to be practised daily rather than merely written about or practised in a rigid institutional setting. 

Underlying all Aboriginal belief is a view of a world gifted by Manitow. Our purpose on earth is to develop an understanding of how to live in harmony with all of Creation."

"The Knowledge Seeker" is a book that originally enticed me because I wanted to learn more about the First Nations in Canada from a first person perspective.  I still do.  The whole perspective that the Earth is a sanctuary is attractive and inspiring to me.  I treasure the respect the Indigenous people have for all of nature.  

"The Anabaptist Story"  William R. Estep

"It was a foregone conclusion that if the Swiss Reformation were to continue within the context of a state church, Manz must go. The mandate demanding the death penalty for rebaptizing had been issued the previous March, but it had not as yet been enforced. The time had come for the crucial test, and the first victim was to be Felix Manz."

I was first drawn to learn more about the Anabaptists, because they are my ancestors and my heritage, and I am technically an Anabaptist.  I was baptized as a baby in a Lutheran church and then baptized as an adult in my thirties in a Pentecostal church.  Five hundred years earlier what I did could have cost me my life.  But instead, my Lutheran parents came and witnessed my baptism.   

Now... being agnostic, my baptisms are strictly cultural for me, but still hold a value because of what others went through a half a millennium ago.  I am the child of two religious cultures.  If I go back far enough... I can imagine one set of ancestors lighting the fires under the pyre of other set of ancestors.  We, as a human species, have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. 

"A New Earth" Eckart Tolle

"How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware of your attachment to things. Sometimes you may not know that you are attached to something, which is to say, identified, until you lose it or there is the threat of loss. If you then become upset, anxious, and so on, it means you are attached. If you are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification is no longer total. “I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment.” That’s the beginning of the transformation of consciousness."

Maybe this book was one that gave me enough just in the first few chapters.  I did listen to some of Eckart Tolle's stuff on Youtube.  I just didn't finish the book.  But his understanding of self helped me in my journey.  

"Grounded" Diana Butler Bass

" “What did you do to try to shift their awareness from a vertical faith to a more horizontal one?” I queried the Kentucky pastor.

“We planted a garden,” he replied. “We grow food. Lots of food. For the local food bank. We’ve studied the soil and learned about global warming. We’re finding God in the garden. It isn’t quite as vertical as it used to be. Heaven is getting downright earthy.”

And that, of course, is another vision of heaven: a garden. Where dirt, water, and air all come together to feed us, to heal the earth, to produce the atmosphere we need to survive. Paradise, really. Here and now. "

What got me started with this book was the whole idea that the Earth is where our spiritual attention can rest... not some faraway cosmic galaxy religion has penned as "Heaven".  There is a connectedness we can have with the elements here...  sky, dirt, water... that connects us with Creator and the Universe.  We are home... right here, right now.

  

"The Superstition of all Ages" Jean Meslier

"Religion is handed down from fathers to children as the property of a family with the burdens. Very few people in the world would have a God if care had not been taken to give them one. Each one receives from his parents and his instructors the God which they themselves have received from theirs; only, according to his own temperament, each one arranges, modifies, and paints Him agreeably to his taste."

I discovered Jean Meslier when I was a part of the "Atheism for Lent" course with Peter Rollins.  I still like Meslier's rants.  He had the spirit of Christopher Hitchens long before Hitchens existed... but his rants were all done in the privacy of his closet.  He was a Catholic priest.  At first, his approach seemed like hypocrisy, but thinking about it for a while, I see it was survival.  He longed to be true to himself, but most likely his culture didn't allow him that authenticity.  This was 1664-1729.  Maybe I drifted away from the read because there was a lot of redundancy in his rants, and I felt I had enough. 

"Let's All Make the Day Count" Charlie Daniels

When you see a flight of geese overhead, if they are traveling for any extended distance, they will be flying in a V-formation. You’ll also notice a single goose in the lead and the others spread out in the V following the leader.

This is done for aerodynamics, similar to the way NASCAR racers draft off the car in front of them. The geese do much the same thing flying beak to tail, taking some of the air resistance off each other.

When the lead goose gets tired, he drops back. A fresh goose takes his place, and the flight goes on.

If one of the geese in the flight gets sick or, for whatever reason, has to go down to the ground, two other geese drop out of the formation. They go to the ground with the sick bird and stay until it gets better or dies. Pending the outcome, they return to the air and try to catch up with their flight.

If they are too far behind to catch up, they’ll join the formation of another flight and continue on.

Geese mate for life. Sensible bunch.

At this stage of my life, daily devotionals are not that much of a priority.  This seemed to be an exception at the time.  Charlie Daniels had some "rubber meets the road" wisdom in this book, and I found his perspective illuminating.  

* * * 

I guess I can't really officially recommend any of these books, as I didn't finish them.  But I learned something about me the day I created a file in my Ibooks that was marked "Reads I started but...". 

I found out that I could extend grace to myself.  

Maybe not all things need finishing in life.  Maybe it is okay in some things to just let go when all I am doing is pushing through because of obligation to a completion, instead of enjoying the journey.  Reading is like that.  Some books I finish and my blog is testament to my ability to finish.  I am the biggest proponent of doing more things out of passion and less out of obligation.  Reading is a passion and I don't want obligation to complete a book to be the only reason I am reading.  

Now... back to puzzling.