Seeking serenity
24/04/13 04:03
PLEASE NOTE: I try hard not to tell stories about people who might be identified by readers of my blog. These stories are, after all, the stories of others and they are not my stories to tell. But, from time to time, my experiences involve other people and when I tell my story, it contains a bit of the story of another. I caution those who know me well and know the people that I serve from trying to identify the people in my blog. Even if you know the person about whom I am writing, you can only know part of the story. My blog does not give a complete picture of another and there is always more to the story.
I invested much of yesterday afternoon visiting a man who has experienced significant memory loss. I don’t know the official diagnosis of his condition, but several have used Alzheimer’s disease when speaking of him and his condition. He lives quite a ways out of town on a small acreage with a beautiful view and you can see immediately what attracted him to build his home in such a beautiful location. But these days he cannot drive and so his home has become something quite opposite than the symbol of freedom that he once enjoyed. He has live-in caregivers who are kind and attentive to his needs and I believe has the financial means to continue this arrangement for as long as it takes. He leaves his home only to go to medical appointments these days. The regular excursions to meet with friends, attend church, go out to dinner, shop and travel that once were a part of his life are now gone. I suspect that it takes considerable effort to get him ready to leave the home, that there are all sorts of possible unforeseen problems when going into town with one who has significant physical abilities, but diminished cognitive capability. Whatever the reasons, he is now cut off from others in his own beautiful home. I have witnessed the tragedy of diseases that rob people of their memories enough to know that these are devastating diseases.
He is aware than his brain is not functioning properly. He spoke of it several times in the course of the visit saying, “My brain no longer works,” “I’m on the downhill slide,” “I can’t find the word,” and other similar phrases. Occasionally he would start to tell me something, be unable to find the words to express his idea and give up in frustration.
Like many similar visits with others, we went through the same story repeatedly in the course of an hour’s visit. Sadly, the story that was repeated over and over was one about which he has significant regret and feels a bit of remorse. He told me, at one point, that he was dreading my visit because he would have to explain this event. There is no logical reason why our conversation would have needed to broach the topic except that he seemed to need to tell me about the situation and how he felt – perhaps how he still feels, since the scenario keeps replaying in his mind over and over. I guess that when the brain is trying to process meaning in the presence of lost memory, it gets “hung up” on certain stories and those stories come to the surface again and again.
The sad thing is that the memory that keeps being repeated is one of regret. This man once had a world of pleasant memories. He served in a mobile medical unit in Korea during the Korean War and used to be able to tell stories about how he liked the challenge of that work and felt that his life had been a bit like the television series M*A*S*H. He was a pilot and at one time had a host of stories about flying light airplanes around the country and the joy of seeing the world from the air. He sang in church choirs all of his life and loved to sing. He was present when Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians sang an inaugural concert at Constitution Hall when Eisenhower was president. He used to love to tell the story of how moved he was by that concert. He was a collector of vintage and antique vehicles and used to love driving to church in a beautifully restored 1951 Henry J. He took great delight in the fact that not many people remember Kaiser’s effort to enter the low price market by building a small car and couldn’t identify what kind of car he was driving. He had a successful business career and at one time could tell you about the things he had accomplished. He was somewhat less successful in marriage, but the third match was a good one and he took great delight in telling stories about his wife and the travels they took and the tragedy of her premature death from cancer.
But yesterday, it seemed as if all of the pleasant and productive memories were somehow lost and the only story he could tell was one of regret. How I wished he could replace that particular memory with a more pleasant one! I kept trying to gently guide the conversation to a more pleasant memory and told him bits of stories that he had previously told me. But the topic quickly returned to the story that was being told over and over again. I tried to say that I understand and that forgiveness is a gift of God. I prayed a prayer of absolution, trying to free him from the “stuck” memory. But he was still telling me the story as I rose to leave, pressured by the deadline of an upcoming meeting.
As I took my parting, I closed our time with the opening lines of the famous prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr: “God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
The prayer was for him, but it was also for me. If I should one day be trapped by the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia, I genuinely hope that the memories in which I become stuck are pleasant and beautiful, for my life has been far more joy than regret. This, however, is not something I can control. May I find grace to accept with serenity those things that I cannot change.