The Art Of Grieving
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on July 26, 2023.
A life without grief is not possible – unless you’re willing to settle for a life without love. They come in tandem, inseparable, matched in size and sizzle. If we aspire to a big, full, juicy life, we should get good at grieving.
What would that look like? I’ve just listened to seven podcast episodes by Gavin Crawford, Let’s Not be Kidding’, about him losing his mother the Alzheimer’s and eventually, long eventually, to death. It’s a sad story but he’s a comedian, as are most of the friends he includes who are also losing parents to dementia, so there are lots of laughs. It’s hard to laugh about sad things without seeming disrespectful. They walk that line. Deep digging, dark humour.
My empathy with Gavin frequently defaults to comparison that borders on competition – not a good thing. I too lost someone I loved to dementia and it was, as Gavin’s, a big hole, a huge loss of sizzle in my life. He lost the mother who loved who he was and who/what he became; I lost the spouse who nurtured me into becoming all that I could be, as, I think and hope and believe, I did him. There are equal signs between the experiences; there are also not-equal signs.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the difference between adult child caregiving and spousal caregiving for people with dementia. Partly because the literature about living with dementia tends to be written by adult children, perhaps because spouses are too consumed or too broken to make the space to share their experience. I want to honour the adult child experience but I resist the tendency for it to replace my experience. Different but equal. Please.
The slash that differentiates equal and not-equal, that signifies the nature of the difference, is reciprocity. Spousal relationships are reciprocal; parent-child relationships are hierarchical. Dementia – perhaps aging in general, but dementia in pastel particularity – creates dependency, which up-ends the child-parent relationship and wrenches reciprocity into hierarchy.
Upside down hierarchies are not easy, but they are reminiscent of what they were – as manifest in the ‘jokes’ about ‘they changed our diapers and now we change theirs’. Aurora Brown, of Baroness von Sketch fame (episode 6), identifies incontinence as the threshold that leads to the decision ‘to put the person away’. Jann Arden, iconic singer, says ‘Nobody wants to do that for their parents’ and the comic gang expand, with dark humour, on the differences between baby and senior diapering. Jann kept her mother at home with hired staff costing $22,000 a month - which meant she was on the road to earn the necessary money, living with the stress of not being able to be two places at once: the line for her was her mother coming perilously close to burning the house down during the 40 seconds Jann snatched from active surveillance to take a pee. Upside-down hierarchies are not easy.
The loss of spousal reciprocity is less evident to outside eyes. The adult child stress of being two places at once gives way to the spousal exhaustion of 24/7 care. Gavin, while extolling the challenges of his parents visiting him and his husband for a month, doesn’t mention that there is a father/husband in the picture until episode 3, and tells no other stories of how his father managed caregiving until he describes his father ‘hoofing’ his mother’s wheelchair into the care home when they returned from a drive, making the quick getaway he knew to be the best way, even though it looked uncaring and disrespectful. Gavin jokes about the many clever ways he manages his mother not recognizing him, but passes lightly over his dad calling a child other than Gavin (I think I know why) ‘quite beside himself, just desperate to say…could you just tell your mother I’m me’. Scott Thompson, of Kids in the Hall fame (episode 6), is more introspective. He acknowledges that he ‘didn’t quite understand how much pain [his caregiver father] was in because I was so angry at him’. It’s not clear what the source of anger was, but recognizing it allowed Scott to acknowledge that, although his parents had had many children, ‘this was a love affair, and we [children] are all secondary…We were not their number one priority. Each other was.’ That’s reciprocity.
Heart-break does not come in tidy packages. It surprises us, how and when and where it cracks us open. There is no pill to take, no prescribed rehabilitation, no guarantee or even reliable prediction about how healing will proceed. In fact, I question that healing is the goal. I prefer ‘interment’. We use it to mean burial of mortal remains, but the derivation is ‘to place within’. Within the earth, yes, maybe. But certainly within our hearts and lives, leaving them scarred, yes, but bigger and stronger and better prepared for our eventual departure. That’s grieving.
