I don’t envy those who try to learn the English language when it is not their first language. For example, words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same are called HOMONYMS, like the three words in the title of this post. Words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently are called HETERONYMS. Some examples of both of these anomalies:
I need to alter the arrangement on the altar. Did you develop instructions about the right way to write?
While viewing the beautiful redflower in the vase, I read the cookie recipe and opened the canister of flour. I rode my bike on the road in the desert but had to desert the area because it was close to getting dark so I had to close out my plans.
I was born in the United States to a middle-class family. My parents and my older brother and sister spoke English, so quite naturally the first words out of my mouth were also English ones. The educational system of which I was a part was English speaking only and although learning how to diagram sentences was a requirement, it was expected of me, and I didn’t have to discard any non-English rules to do so along the way.
HOW DO NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE MANAGE?
One of my nieces is from Russia and when my sister and brother-in-law adopted my sixteen-year-old niece from a Russian orphanage, Kristina didn’t speak or understand English. She is now in her mid-30s and has a successful job. Keep in mind, Kristina’s parents didn’t know or understand the Russian language either, so the challenges existed on both sides. BUT, and this is an important BUT, my sister and brother-in-law were born and raised in the United States so the biggest post-adoption adjustment occurred for the teenager who entered high school as an extremely handicapped individual and managed to graduate from her secondary school AND attend college. WOW!
The bottom line regarding the English language is that even though there are rules about how to write and speak the language, those rules don’t always apply, and when they do, they are still confusing as heck. I have deep respect for anyone who attempts – and succeeds at – learning the English language. At seventy years of age, I still struggle with discerning the correct word choices and sentence structures in any given circumstance, and I am a published author who is supposed to know a thing or two about the correct way to speak and to write! As I leave you with a few more frustration-inducing examples, think of those with whom you come in contact who might struggle with the language that comes so naturally to you. Perhaps we can all exercise a bit more grace towards them as a result.
HOMONYMS: ate or eight way or weigh aisle or isle blue or blew buy or bye
HETERONYMS: tear (crying result) or tear (rip something up); object (an item) or object (in a courtroom); lead (as in a heavy metal box) or lead (using a map to guide someone)
At seventy years of age, the end of 2023 saw me setting out to make space in my home’s storage areas. My husband and I weren’t running out of storage space, but in an effort to help our adult children should either my husband or I be out of the picture – which of course will happen eventually – we dragged out the under-the-stairs storage bins filled with photos, mementos, and journals to lessen the emotional impact on our adult daughters when the time does come, whether tomorrow or many years from now.
Doing so meant the emotions would no doubt come barreling down on me. Boy did they.
As many of you know, I was the caregiver for my father after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. When caring for my father after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, I kept meticulous journals on the progression of the disease from which he died in October 2007. I kept those journals so I could provide in-the-moment accurate updates to my brother and sister so those journal entries were VERY detailed about incidents I would rather not revisit.
But revisit them I did, and although the emotions that came through were raw, letting them bombard and fill me was a necessary step so that in the future our daughters would not have to wonder what they should do with all the anguish-filled words I put down on paper in those journals. You see, once I recently re-read my journals, I shredded them, knowing I didn’t need them for future reference. Over the course of several days, I digested their emotional impact and then eliminated them – remembering all that occurred, but not needing to save such records for decades to come. Bags and bags of shredded and disposed business effects and medical records were a gift I consciously gave to our daughters well in advance so they would not be put through the decision-making process of trying to figure out what the heck to do with Mom’s emotional ramblings and Grandma and Grampa’s business and health records that have been in my possession for so many years. My husband and I have already streamlined our own personal business effects so although at our passing our daughters will have to pour over them and address what is necessary at that time, at least they won’t have the much older generation’s business matters with which to contend.
But along with the somewhat devastating emotions experienced while going through the storage bins came joyful emotions in discovering decades of old keepsakes that shed a light on who my parents and grandparents were in the 1800s and 1900s. The most cherished keepsake were my parents’ love letters to each other a week before they got married in the 1940s. They were so in love with each other and did not hesitate to put that love into words as a gift to each other a few days before their May 26th wedding day. I made copies of those letters for our adult children and my siblings. Needless to say, good vibes prevailed in our hearts as a result!
Making space for storage purposes – and for emotional purposes – is an arduous task but the cleansing benefits can very much be worth the effort. I made space for the emotions to enter and pass through me and somehow or another, I survived that herculean task. Keep in mind, this is not a job for the faint of heart, but if you have it in you, you just might feel as lighthearted and/or relieved as I do now. And for me, that makes the task’s anguish a fading memory rather than a landmine waiting to be discovered.
Last year, I became aware of a neighbor’s struggle with his wife’s newly diagnosed dementia. “Reggie” is in his early 70’s, as am I. Reggie is retired; I am as well. I retired from the long-term care industry working with adults whose conditions are most often associated with aging – Alzheimer’s and other dementia being at the forefront.
Along with that professional experience, I also had hands-on personal experience for both my father, who died from Alzheimer’s disease in 2007, and my sister-in-law, who died from mixed dementia in 2012. Additionally, I worked as an Alzheimer’s Association caregiver support group facilitator for five years. When Reggie advised me of his household’s situation, I filled him in on my varied experiences – simply to add credence to any advice I might offer him – and then I provided information that I thought might help address the various situations he very openly discussed with me over several months’ time. I was thrilled that he joined a nearby caregiver support group that I had recommended because let’s face it, we all could use a little help from a friend, or like-experienced individuals, as the stresses of life present themselves – right? Trust me when I say, that even with all my long-term care experience, I still struggled to apply that textbook knowledge to real life, in-the-moment situations with my loved ones. A little help goes a long way.
Caring for a loved one is always on-the-job training, even during the best of times.
When my neighbor openly disclosed to me that he would be leaving for an out of state trip, I texted him resources that could be of help to him – resources that might assure his wife’s safety and his enjoyment of what I was certain was a much needed and much deserved break from 24/7 caregiving. As my casual neighborly conversations continued with him thereafter, I provided advice in my ongoing friendly efforts to help his wife, and therefore him. When Reggie told me that he had ultimately decided to have another female neighbor, with whom the wife is familiar, check in on his wife for dinner each night while he was out of state, I strongly suggested his wife could benefit from more attentive care in his absence. I brought up several What If scenarios that might pop up during the greater amount of time his wife would be alone. He stated “that would never happen” and “she’s never done that before” to which I suggested it might be more prudent to assume that what would never happen would, and what she would never do, she would do. Reggie stuck with his original plan. Caveat: just before he left for his trip, both my husband and I were recovering from being enmeshed in the hell that is Covid so being more than casual eyes on the prize during his absence was not an option.
The story has an eventual happy ending but getting there was problematic.
A few days in to his multi-day trip, I observed Reggie’s wife walk by my house to walk the dog on her own. She hadn’t walked in the neighborhood alone or with someone else for quite some time. I let her get far enough ahead of me and then followed her to make sure she got home safely. Upon my return, I texted her husband first to ask if he was home; he was not. I sent a second text to let him know that I was concerned because his wife had just gone on a solo walk with the dog. He did not respond to that text, although upon his return, Reggie’s take on his wife’s out-of-the-ordinary behavior was a positive one, in that he was thrilled that she was able to accomplish something that hadn’t been in her wheelhouse in the recent past. Go figure! It’s always a good thing when something positive comes about from a potentially negative event.
I am sorry that one of my What Ifs came true – and thankfully, there were no negative repercussions – but it probably could have been avoided had the neighbor trusted the information provided to him to assure his, and therefore his wife’s, well-being. I don’t need or want to be right, but if my personal and/or professional experiences can somehow help someone, that realized benefit is good for the community. My take on life is that individually we all know some things, but not all things, so I am constantly on the lookout to learn something new that just might augment and benefit my life and the lives of my loved ones.
Full disclosure: ACCEPTING SOMEONE ELSE’S HELP IS A DIFFICULT THING TO DO. I am ashamed to say that I too am guilty of dismissing well-intentioned assistance from kind neighbors, most recently assuring a neighbor a couple blocks from me that she need not make meals for my husband and me while we were convalescing from the very debilitating effects of Covid – a virus we avoided for four years but when it invaded our home, my husband and I fell gravely ill. I regret turning down the offered meals because that gift of meals was a communal generosity that I failed to truly acknowledge at the time. Similarly, I hope Reggie learns something from the What If that came about in his absence, and going forward I pray he is more open to those in our neighborhood community who truly only want the best for him and his wife.
When we don’t know or understand a situation, may we all be open to receiving and applying lessens that just may ease the burden of not knowing. We all need community. We can all benefit from community. If we haven’t learned that fact in the past four-plus years, I fear we/I haven’t learned a thing.
I documented my personal dementia caregiving experiences in my novel Requiem for the Status Quoin my ongoing effort to help those who find themselves in similar family caregiving situations.
I sometimes find myself in new circumstances—perhaps a new medical professional’s office—so that when I check in for an appointment the receptionist or the medical assistant invariably say, “Wow! You don’t look seventy years old!” Which begs the question:
What is 70 years old supposed to look like?
Aging is a strange bedfellow, isn’t it? We can’t get away from it, but would we want to? Doesn’t that bring about a lethal alternative?
Former model, Cindy Joseph said, “Aging is just another word for living.”
From all outward appearances, I look to be in good shape: I’m not overweight, I more or less stand upright (even though I’ve lost 2 inches of height over the past 10 years), I don’t leave the house in inappropriate clothing, and most of the time I remember to put on a pair of earrings in the lobes that were pierced 57 years ago as a teenager. Yep, for all intents and purposes, I present myself as being in pretty darn good shape for a seventy-year-old. But as we all know, outward appearances don’t tell the whole story, do they?
What no one can see is what is going on inside of my seventy-year-old brain. No one sees the worries and the fears that keep me awake at night or that keep me secluded in my home because I don’t feel comfortable driving long distances—especially on freeways—by myself. The receptionist at the medical office isn’t aware of my perfectionistic tendencies that create “What ifs” that need not be addressed but that I revisit over and over and over again in my effort to get things just right.
She or he has no sense of the terror that fills me when a neighborhood dog approaches me that, even though on-leash, I fear may take a chunk out of my leg like the “harmless” dog that did so in my same neighborhood twenty years before.
I am touching on these elements of my life that I am certain exist in many people regardless of their age, simply to point out that appearances can be deceiving. That just because someone presents themselves as in stellar shape doesn’t mean they are 100% healthy. Mental health is health, and without it, fullness of well-being does not exist. Thank goodness we are all becoming more aware of the mental health piece so that the stigma oftentimes attached to it is less pronounced than it was in times past.
I am not at all ashamed to speak of such matters because I know I am not alone. I take pride in the fact that I expend just as much energy to maintain my mental health as I do my bodily health, and apparently, it shows. The way I look at it—my physical body shouldn’t get all the attention, right?
My wish for you is that you nurture your mind just as much as you do your body. Aging isn’t for wimps, and I doubt very seriously that any of you would choose to fall into that wimpy category. Rock on everyone and celebrate the proof of life that your age has afforded you.
I finished off 2023 by going through numerous storage bins that were filled with photos, mementos, and historical family records. I didn’t enjoy it, but I am glad I spent the time to do so. I wrote about that emotional process in my column that appears in an online Australian publication called Grandparents Day Magazine. I welcome you to click on the link. Perhaps it will encourage rather than discourage you to do the same.
Please know that you need not overbook yourself this month – when we usually feel we have no choice but to do so – nor do you need to do so in any future month. This message is brief but I hope it lands with you. If you don’t matter, no one matters.
The voracious demon has no respect for its unsuspecting prey; I personally met it twice and lost two loved ones to it. Although younger citizens manage to avoid being consumed by this fiend, those older have little defense against its murderous appetite.
“I’m not going!” Amanda is tired of her husband’s persistent attempts to take her on a surprise outing. Giving up is not an option for Seth, however, so he resorts to lying.
“Okay, you don’t have to accompany me, but I thought you’d want to pick out the size of the emerald for your ring. I’ll just wing it and hope you like it.”
Amanda put her hands on her hips. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have dressed better. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be good to go.” Seth wasn’t proud of his deception, but the concern he felt outweighed any questionable ethics at play.
As soon as Amanda returned wearing a different outfit, Seth pulled her into a hug. “You’ve made me the happiest man in all of Seattle.” Amanda pulled away from him, “Just Seattle? Last night you talked about the whole world, not just our little corner of it. Where are we going? To Tiffany’s?”
Twenty minutes later, Seth pulled his vintage Chevy into a parking space marked Patients-Only. Amanda looked around. “We shouldn’t park here, there must be a space closer to the store than this one.” Seth didn’t look at her when he said, “I parked here for a reason.”
“Okay, you’re being creepy. I want you to back up and head to the jewelry store!”
Seth turned to his wife. “You’re sick, Amanda. You’ve got that … brain disease. We’re seeing a specialist today to get us the help you need.”
Amanda crossed her arms, hurt more than angry at Seth’s trickery. “I’m not really sick-sick, and I don’t care about some silly ol’ emerald, let’s go to that car show in South Seattle you mentioned the other day.”
“The car show was two months ago. I took photos of you behind the wheel of that shiny red Corvette, remember?” Seth got out of the car, opened the passenger door, and crouched beside her. “I love you so much, but I can’t protect you. The doctor said the types of tests he’s going to perform won’t hurt. I’d like to know what we’re dealing with so we can be prepared for what’s to come.”
Seth couldn’t stand to see his wife cry. Eventually Amanda composed herself. “What about my anniversary gift? I want to celebrate!”
“We celebrated our anniversary four months ago.”
Amanda wiped her face. “Now you’re just being stupid. We didn’t celebrate our anniversary yet. We got married in August and it’s only – whatever month it is right now. Take me away from here.”
“In February, twenty-five years ago, we vowed to love each other forevermore, and we renewed those vows four months ago. I’m just as much in love with you now as I was then which is why I want you to have a thorough medical exam. Please, Amanda, do this for me?”
Seth helped his wife out of the car and held her close. “I wish this wasn’t happening, but it is. This nice doctor will spend a few hours with you while I go shop for a new tool for my workshop.”
“You won’t forget that I’m here, will you? You’ll take me home afterwards?”
“Of course.”
Amanda said, “Okeydokey, but you have to cross your heart and hope to die, or I won’t believe you.” Seth took a step away from his wife. “Cross my heart and hope to die, you’ll always be the apple of my eye. When years and years have passed us by, I’ll still be your favorite guy.” Seth kissed her forehead, nose, and lips, then taking Amanda’s hand, they walked into the Seattle Urban Medical Clinic.
The imp makes itself known by gradually invading the privacy of the victim’s brain. Helpless family members struggle to hold on to those infected by a plague that can strip their loved ones of all functional abilities.
A week later Seth met with Dr. Mishra to go over the neurological findings, prior to a joint appointment with Amanda. “Your wife’s case is one of the most aggressive I’ve seen. Historically, early onset victims tend to have a stronger strain of the disease which oftentimes manifests itself in extremely unpredictable behaviors. Your wife is a poster child for that profile. Her primary care physician indicated that her symptoms became very pronounced six months ago. Tell me about those symptoms.”
“Didn’t Dr. Tobias provide that information in her notes?”
“She did, but I’d like your take on it.”
Seth dove in. “Amanda used to be a fastidious person but that started to change. I always left for work an hour before her so I was never home when she showered to get ready for her job at an accounting firm downtown.”
“Does she still hold that job?”
“No.” Seth continued. “One Sunday morning I concluded she hadn’t showered in a while. She insisted she had. I figured I’d encourage her by asking her to join me in the shower, which she did. Afterwards I suggested that maybe she only thought she had showered. She started to cry and accused me of thinking she was ugly. I just let it go and hoped that little episode would correct itself in time.”
“Did it?”
“No, and her lack of personal hygiene shifted to the house. One day I didn’t get home from the office until late. I had helped her plan dinner menus for the entire week and that evening’s meal was chicken stir fry. I cut up the chicken in the morning and put the raw pieces in a zip-bag with Teriyaki sauce to marinate in the fridge. When I got home, she finalized dinner preparations while I headed upstairs to change. Back downstairs, she sat at the dining table with a proud smile on her face and said, ‘Voila!’ but the dishes at each of our place settings were filled with cooked rice and uncooked chicken. She was just about to put a forkful in her mouth when I grabbed her hand. When I explained that the chicken was raw, she ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. From that point forward we agreed that I would make dinner every night.”
“How was she with household chores?”
“She couldn’t figure out how to do the day-to-day stuff: vacuuming, laundry, you name it.”
The doctor asked, “What lead to her leaving her job?”
“There were days when Amanda didn’t go to work because she forgot she had a job. One day she arrived two hours late and simply sat in her office, not knowing what she was supposed to do. Her boss called me that day and said Amanda wasn’t well and should go home. She also talked about Amanda’s ongoing erratic work behavior. That was Amanda’s last day at work.”
“How was your wife’s general health at the time?”
“My wife seemed healthy. She didn’t have any of the conditions common with aging. Heck, she went through menopause, and I wasn’t even aware of it.”
“Consider yourself lucky.”
“I do.”
“Look, doctor, this is old news. My wife endured several hours of testing, and I expected you to tell me something new. You said she has an aggressive type of the disease, what does that mean?”
Dr. Mishra turned the computer screen around toward Seth. “Your wife’s brain has been invaded in such a way that the frontal portion is shrinking dramatically.”
Seth looked at the MRI image. “No way, that can’t be Amanda’s brain, you’re mistaken.”
“There’s no mistake. The testing conclusively indicated that her behaviors, and the decline in her ability to perform many daily activities, indicate an abnormal variant of the disease.”
“What else will this ‘variant’ do to her?”
“Your wife could lose her ability to speak and walk, and eventually her organs will not function effectively.”
Seth leaned on the front of the doctor’s desk. “This disease, when will it take her away from me?
“Less than five years if she’s lucky.”
“If she’s lucky? What’s lucky about that?”
Amanda’s mother stayed at home with Amanda while Seth attended monthly dementia caregiver support group meetings. Seth felt encouraged but was equally as discouraged when other members’ loved ones joined the ranks of the deceased. He knew he couldn’t change the course of his wife’s illness but was determined to do all he could to maintain her dignity until the end.
World governments have failed to adequately reduce the percentage of those who fall victim to the perils of this demon disease.
Unfortunately, Seth and Amanda’s journey is just one of countless cases where unsuspecting peoples’ lives have been ruined in a world where Alzheimer’s and other dementia – the demon murderers – show little sign of abating.
HELPFUL RESOURCES:
AlzAuthors, an extraordinary resource of hundreds of vetted reading content about all types of dementia.
My life is still shaped by my personal experience as a dementia caregiver for my father who died from Alzheimer’s disease on October 13th, 2007. As is indicated in my previous post, I didn’t want to write about my experience, but I couldn’t help but do so in my effort to honor those affected by this always terminal illness. I am glad I did, to which this review attests:
The author, who has closely experienced the cruelty of Alzheimer’s in a loved one, has shown a great deal of courage and consummate determination in writing this tale.
This well-paced and brilliantly written story is at once poignant, agonizing, funny in places and all-consuming. The reader will have difficulty putting it down but had best keep a box of tissues at hand. It made this hardened, former combat solider weep like a school child through much of the second half.
I have emerged from this novel with greater sensitivity to the whole continuum of dementia and its emotional impact on those who must find a way of dealing with its encroachment on their lives. There are not enough superlatives in the English language to give justice to a description of this novel by an obviously compassionate, energetic, and witty author. It is worthy of six stars. – R. Bruce Logan, author of BACK TO VIETNAM:TOURS OF THE HEART
REQUIEM FOR THE STATUS QUO and all of Mr. Logan’s books can be found on Amazon or wherever you buy your books.
My thoughts about being a family caregiver. Been there, done that.
Even with all the book knowledge a person can garner, caregiving “mistakes” are bound to happen. The following tips are provided to active and former family caregivers who struggle with what they consider failed attempts at getting the caregiving task done correctly.
Perfection is highly overrated. No one, absolutely no one, expects you to do everything correctly 100% of the time.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Why? See Tip #1 above and Tip #3 below.
Caregiving is difficult, so celebrate the wins! Sometimes you will have just the right way of doing or saying something that wipes out every other time you feel you didn’t do or say something correctly. Tally up the victories and celebrate them!
Carefully choose your confidantes. Having acquaintances that are slow to judge but quick to affirm will be just the nourishment your body and soul will need.
If you are doing your best, that is all that is needed. But you say, “I could have done better!” No. You did the best with what you knew at the time, therefore you are to be congratulated. Instead, ask yourself, “Did I give it all that I could in the moment?” Yes, you did.
“Mistakes” are simply learning opportunities. Even today, years after my family caregiving experience, I remind myself that when something in my life isn’t going quite as planned, I can still learn something from that lesson, which is an “unmistakably” good thing, don’t you think?
I wrote a novel about my own caregiving experience. Just like my caregiving skills were a work in progress, so too was this novel, published a few years after my father passed from Alzheimer’s disease. May it encourage you, or someone you know, who just might need a cheerleader in their corner.
The writer Anne Lamott really nailed it on the head with this sentiment. I certainly get up and walk and I also fall down…fortunately not the physical type, but definitely the emotional type of falling down, but do I keep dancing through my days regardless?
I can’t say that I do.
Mind you, I always recover because after 70 years on this earth, I have proven to be quite resilient and although the recovery period takes longer than I would want, somehow or other I have survived every horrible day or event I have encountered in my life. In my birthday post, I mentioned the living milestones one encounters after 70 years which also included the number of breaths to my name as of my birthdate: 434,350,000, and the breaths keep adding up! But that’s not enough for me; what else can I do?
I can stop letting the stresses of life get in the way of my dancing.
I may not dance in the literal sense, but I can decide to shake off the intricacies of the world around me so that my health and well-being aren’t adversely affected. That does not mean that I don’t care about those intricacies – trust me, I lose considerable sleep over the caring that I harbor – but I will be a better participant in this life if I let my spirit and psyche dance a bit more than not.
And if doing so rubs off on others? All the better, so I will dance, dance, dance.
I previously posted, here, about what it takes to make it to seventy-years-old but I left out one statistic which I now provide to you on this American holiday, Labor Day.
Based on statistics of taking 17,000 breaths a day, when I turned 70 earlier this summer I had already taken 434,350,000 breaths. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty darn impressive. One need not be an Olympic athlete, or any athlete for that matter, for the breaths to still add up.
One breath at a time. That is all that is needed, today, and every day.
Many of us of a certain age have endured much throughout our lives, both personally and historically. I have had the right to vote in the United States for fifty-two years. Let me tell you, I have witnessed my share of elections that didn’t go my way and somehow my country has managed to survive, which for some election cycles is really saying a lot. On the other hand, some election results pleased me to no end, allowing me to endure periods of time of seeming ease.
Residents of each country reading this post have faced monumental weather anomalies, financial hardships, and devastating illnesses. If you are reading this piece, you have made it through those disasters and perhaps have wondered how you made it! I’ll tell you right now, there are individual days wherein I have questioned my own ability to do so and yet I woke up every day-after able to call myself a survivor.
As of the date I turned seventy-years-old earlier this summer, I marveled at the fact that my body had rewarded me with daily breath more than 25,500 days in a row. Astounding! And what about the heart? Given an average 100 beats per minute – at least at my age – that equated to 3,672,000,000 beats as of the date I turned 70! WHAT???!!! If that isn’t endurance, I don’t know what is! Thank you, precious heart of mine!
Now I will confess to you that I am a habitual catastrophic thinker (for me that means that I assume the worst rather than the best) so the stats I just gave you are vital tidbits of information I can now add to my evidence list that things are better than I might have assumed them to be. And perhaps such evidence will sufficiently encourage you to increase your own hope quotient so you can find the best, instead of the worst, going forward.
If that is the case, I am absolutely thrilled for you, and I’m thrilled for me as I grab my calculator to figure out how many breaths I’ve taken in the past 25,500 days and counting!
Sometimes our thoughts can lead us astray, as I hinted at in my previous post. The above quote from a meditation coach I listen to really resonated with me.
There are so many aspects of our being for which we need to provide a harbor of safety and calm. Sometimes our boat is easily guided towards that safe harbor, and other times? Not so much.
My encouragement to all of us today is to not seek perfection, to understand that we will always encounter rough seas during our life, and when a wave is at its peak, we can know that on the other side of that wave, calm is waiting for us.
THOUGHTS No doubt you have been told that thoughts are just thoughts, that they are not facts. That’s true and we know that to be true, but do we believe it? Rarely. Instead, we let our thoughts consume us, depriving us of calm and making sleep as elusive as winning a big lottery jackpot.
WORRY. ANXIETY. STRESS. ACK!!!!! Everyone has their own “favorite” topic of the aforementioned emotionally distressing occurrences. Health, or lack thereof, is the catalyst for anxiety that is universally experienced, but one need not have that type of fear for ones’ thoughts to take center stage.
Family challenges, financial insecurities, political upheaval. Upcoming life events, whether positive or negative in nature. Socially and emotionally charged incidents. My goodness, the list is interminable! If only we could stop thinking such things!
THE BRAIN DOES WHAT IT’S DESIGNED TO DO I don’t have a magic solution to stop all thought and quite frankly, it’s not possible. Making worthless attempts to stop all thought adds stress, stress adds tension, and tension builds anxiety. Accept that you can’t terminate all thought; personally, that was a very helpful starting point. Acceptance is the key but please know that acceptance does not equate to agreement, rather, it simply means you acknowledge what’s happening and move forward through it without fighting it because…fighting adds stress, stress adds tension, and tension builds anxiety.
ACCEPT THE POSITIVE AND THE NEGATIVE I don’t subscribe to the philosophy of think positive thoughts and all your worries will disappear. Nope, but what I do subscribe to is getting to a place of understanding that nothing is permanent…NOTHING. The bad times wane and, of course, so do the good times. For me, knowing that to be an incontrovertible fact helps me realize that my thoughts aren’t worth investing in. I enjoy the warm fuzzies that positive thoughts give me while trying not to assign too much weight to the negative thoughts that occur unbidden at the most inopportune times, like when I’m trying to fall asleep.
THIS TOO SHALL PASS We know that’s true. Just as the weather changes, so do circumstances. Remember, nothing is permanent, so along with understanding that bad times aren’t permanent, we have to be willing to accept that neither are the good times, and that’s a healthy mentality to have because you can’t have one without the other. Please know, I’ve given this topic an extraordinary amount of thought and have had countless opportunities to practice letting go and letting be, but I am still a work in progress where failure oftentimes outweighs the successes, but practice makes perfect or at least as perfect as us fallible beings can be. You’ve got this my friends. Just as I believe in my ability to wade through all the positive and negative thoughts that fill up my head, I believe in your ability as well. Welcome each opportunity to engage in this practice. Eventually, you and I will get the hang of it and we’ll be better off as a result.
I lived the dementia caregiver’s journey. When it was time to write about it after my father’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, I chose the Fiction genre, rather than Non-Fiction. That’s what worked for me, and I am pleased that it also worked for readers. This review warmed my heart as it was exactly what I was hoping for.
The story-telling format is a gentle way to learn about symptoms and progression of this eventually terminal ailment. Most revealing were the passages depicting Colleen’s exchanges within her caregiver support group. This technique allows the author to educate her readers about the varied behavioral challenges faced by the patient and sometimes not-so-patient caregivers.
The author also manages, through well-written dialogues with Colleen’s siblings and her best friend, to do a lot of teaching without overwhelming technical medical jargon or lecturing.
This novel is a tender one about a family who manages to help their father maintain his dignity throughout a grueling and heartbreaking journey.– Elaine H., British Columbia, CANADA
Even though no human being is perfect, we always have the chance to bring what’s unique about us to life in a redeeming way.
Irene says: I celebrate being perfectly imperfect. And my normal weekly blog posts will commence on August 7th. I hope you have enjoyed this Mr. Rogers summer interlude.
When we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong with the fearful, the true mixed in with the façade, and of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way.
As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us is, that each of us has something that no one else has or ever will have something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.
You are special. There’s only one of you in this wonderful world. In a way, you’ve already won in this world because you’re the only one who can be you!
Mr. Fred Rogers had a boat load of wisdom that he passed along during his show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. With summer approaching and the outdoors calling my name, I am going to share tidbits of his wisdom each week. This inaugural Rogers quote centers on children.
Anyone who does anything to help a child in her or his life is a hero.
I celebrate the fact that I am perfectly imperfect. I have no goal of ever being perfect. In my mind, perfection is greatly misdiagnosed when applied to human beings.
How is human perfection measured? (Humans are involved)
Whose standards are used? (Human standards)
Why aim at perfection when doing so can cause comparison and strife that individuals can certainly do without? (Yeah, why?)
Comparison. Ugh, no good can come from such a practice. Whether you compare your life to other people’s lives on social media – or you compare yourself to your neighbor, friend, or enemy – more often than not the measuring rod’s results will not bend in your favor. Why? Because we are hard on ourselves and therefore in our minds will never measure up.
We are individuals and therefore distinctly different from everyone else!
We complement each other; filling in the blanks that quite naturally exist within each of us.
And THAT, my friends, is something worth celebrating: me helping you, you helping me. A definition of:
Spotlight on Care is an extraordinary podcast developed by the University of California at Irvine Mind Institute.
I was honored to participate in this podcast service very recently and provide it to you at this time. It is only 25 minutes long, a perfect length to grab your attention and then let you be on your way. If you know of a family caregiver who might also benefit, please share it with them.
True beauty exists in a person who is kind, giving, and loving.
Without a doubt, each person reading this post has encountered outwardly beautiful people who oozed ugliness. We have also witnessed the opposite to be true: the less-than-beautiful acting with extreme ugliness. Genuine beauty exists deep within the heart and the mind.
I’m not telling you anything new and I’m not going to go on and on about this subject other than to say:
Words and actions matter.
PLEASE MAKE YOURS COUNT AS I TRY TO MAKE MINE COUNT AS WELL.
How about family caregivers who live near their loved one?
This Spotlight on Care audio podcast, only 25 minutes in length, will encourage you greatly. I was the long distance caregiver for my father who died in 2007 from Alzheimer’s disease. This recent podcast produced by the University of California at Irvine MIND institute provides a snippet of how I succeeded, or failed, in my efforts to make my father’s experience as carefree as possible. I was just like you: figuring it out as I went along, picking and choosing methods that might help both my and my father’s experience. Looking back, I can celebrate that I did my best, and that’s all that matters.
Doing your best doesn’t demand perfection, just your best.
I don’t envy those who try to learn the English language when it is not their first language. For example, words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same are called HOMONYMS, like the three words in the title of this post. Words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently are called HETERONYMS. Some examples of both of these anomalies:
HOW DO NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE MANAGE?
At seventy years of age, the end of 2023 saw me setting out to make space in my home’s storage areas. My husband and I weren’t running out of storage space, but in an effort to help our adult children should either my husband or I be out of the picture – which of course will happen eventually – we dragged out the under-the-stairs storage bins filled with photos, mementos, and journals to lessen the emotional impact on our adult daughters when the time does come, whether tomorrow or many years from now.
But revisit them I did, and although the emotions that came through were raw, letting them bombard and fill me was a necessary step so that in the future our daughters would not have to wonder what they should do with all the anguish-filled words I put down on paper in those journals. You see, once I recently re-read my journals, I shredded them, knowing I didn’t need them for future reference. Over the course of several days, I digested their emotional impact and then eliminated them – remembering all that occurred, but not needing to save such records for decades to come. Bags and bags of shredded and disposed business effects and medical records were a gift I consciously gave to our daughters well in advance so they would not be put through the decision-making process of trying to figure out what the heck to do with Mom’s emotional ramblings and Grandma and Grampa’s business and health records that have been in my possession for so many years. My husband and I have already streamlined our own personal business effects so although at our passing our daughters will have to pour over them and address what is necessary at that time, at least they won’t have the much older generation’s business matters with which to contend.
But along with the somewhat devastating emotions experienced while going through the storage bins came joyful emotions in discovering decades of old keepsakes that shed a light on who my parents and grandparents were in the 1800s and 1900s. The most cherished keepsake were my parents’ love letters to each other a week before they got married in the 1940s. They were so in love with each other and did not hesitate to put that love into words as a gift to each other a few days before their May 26th wedding day. I made copies of those letters for our adult children and my siblings. Needless to say, good vibes prevailed in our hearts as a result!
Making space for storage purposes – and for emotional purposes – is an arduous task but the cleansing benefits can very much be worth the effort. I made space for the emotions to enter and pass through me and somehow or another, I survived that herculean task. Keep in mind, this is not a job for the faint of heart, but if you have it in you, you just might feel as lighthearted and/or relieved as I do now. And for me, that makes the task’s anguish a fading memory rather than a landmine waiting to be discovered.
Lessening the burden of another.
When my neighbor openly disclosed to me that he would be leaving for an out of state trip, I texted him resources that could be of help to him – resources that might assure his wife’s safety and his enjoyment of what I was certain was a much needed and much deserved break from 24/7 caregiving. As my casual neighborly conversations continued with him thereafter, I provided advice in my ongoing friendly efforts to help his wife, and therefore him. When Reggie told me that he had ultimately decided to have another female neighbor, with whom the wife is familiar, check in on his wife for dinner each night while he was out of state, I strongly suggested his wife could benefit from more attentive care in his absence. I brought up several What If scenarios that might pop up during the greater amount of time his wife would be alone. He stated “that would never happen” and “she’s never done that before” to which I suggested it might be more prudent to assume that what would never happen would, and what she would never do, she would do. Reggie stuck with his original plan. Caveat: just before he left for his trip, both my husband and I were recovering from being enmeshed in the hell that is Covid so being more than casual eyes on the prize during his absence was not an option.
Full disclosure: ACCEPTING SOMEONE ELSE’S HELP IS A DIFFICULT THING TO DO. I am ashamed to say that I too am guilty of dismissing well-intentioned assistance from kind neighbors, most recently assuring a neighbor a couple blocks from me that she need not make meals for my husband and me while we were convalescing from the very debilitating effects of Covid – a virus we avoided for four years but when it invaded our home, my husband and I fell gravely ill. I regret turning down the offered meals because that gift of meals was a communal generosity that I failed to truly acknowledge at the time. Similarly, I hope Reggie learns something from the What If that came about in his absence, and going forward I pray he is more open to those in our neighborhood community who truly only want the best for him and his wife.
I sometimes find myself in new circumstances—perhaps a new medical professional’s office—so that when I check in for an appointment the receptionist or the medical assistant invariably say, “Wow! You don’t look seventy years old!” Which begs the question:
She or he has no sense of the terror that fills me when a neighborhood dog approaches me that, even though on-leash, I fear may take a chunk out of my leg like the “harmless” dog that did so in my same neighborhood twenty years before.
The voracious demon has no respect for its unsuspecting prey; I personally met it twice and lost two loved ones to it. Although younger citizens manage to avoid being consumed by this fiend, those older have little defense against its murderous appetite.
The writer Anne Lamott really nailed it on the head with this sentiment. I certainly get up and walk and I also fall down…fortunately not the physical type, but definitely the emotional type of falling down, but do I keep dancing through my days regardless?
I previously posted, here, about what it takes to make it to seventy-years-old but I left out one statistic which I now provide to you on this American holiday, Labor Day.
Many of us of a certain age have endured much throughout our lives, both personally and historically. I have had the right to vote in the United States for fifty-two years. Let me tell you, I have witnessed my share of elections that didn’t go my way and somehow my country has managed to survive, which for some election cycles is really saying a lot. On the other hand, some election results pleased me to no end, allowing me to endure periods of time of seeming ease.
Now I will confess to you that I am a habitual catastrophic thinker (for me that means that I assume the worst rather than the best) so the stats I just gave you are vital tidbits of information I can now add to my evidence list that things are better than I might have assumed them to be. And perhaps such evidence will sufficiently encourage you to increase your own hope quotient so you can find the best, instead of the worst, going forward.
THOUGHTS No doubt you have been told that thoughts are just thoughts, that they are not facts. That’s true and we know that to be true, but do we believe it? Rarely. Instead, we let our thoughts consume us, depriving us of calm and making sleep as elusive as winning a big lottery jackpot.
THIS TOO SHALL PASS We know that’s true. Just as the weather changes, so do circumstances. Remember, nothing is permanent, so along with understanding that bad times aren’t permanent, we have to be willing to accept that neither are the good times, and that’s a healthy mentality to have because you can’t have one without the other. Please know, I’ve given this topic an extraordinary amount of thought and have had countless opportunities to practice letting go and letting be, but I am still a work in progress where failure oftentimes outweighs the successes, but practice makes perfect or at least as perfect as us fallible beings can be. You’ve got this my friends. Just as I believe in my ability to wade through all the positive and negative thoughts that fill up my head, I believe in your ability as well. Welcome each opportunity to engage in this practice. Eventually, you and I will get the hang of it and we’ll be better off as a result.
I lived the dementia caregiver’s journey. When it was time to write about it after my father’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, I chose the Fiction genre, rather than Non-Fiction. That’s what worked for me, and I am pleased that it also worked for readers. This review warmed my heart as it was exactly what I was hoping for.
It won’t be long now.
Without a doubt, each person reading this post has encountered outwardly beautiful people who oozed ugliness. We have also witnessed the opposite to be true: the less-than-beautiful acting with extreme ugliness. Genuine beauty exists deep within the heart and the mind.
This Spotlight on Care audio podcast, only 25 minutes in length, will encourage you greatly. I was the long distance caregiver for my father who died in 2007 from Alzheimer’s disease. This recent podcast produced by the University of California at Irvine MIND institute provides a snippet of how I succeeded, or failed, in my efforts to make my father’s experience as carefree as possible. I was just like you: figuring it out as I went along, picking and choosing methods that might help both my and my father’s experience. Looking back, I can celebrate that I did my best, and that’s all that matters.
Living: the ultimate team sport 