It occurs to me that I’ve been writing a lot of entries on big political issues and little books. This gives me the pride of being able to say I’m faithful to my blog while still dancing around the bigger boulders in my life that I’d rather not address head on. I’m having a hard time lately with the fact that time goes by so quickly anymore and I want to grab experiences and store them forever, freezing time around the shinier moments.
I had a dream last night that a bunch of extended family had heard there was a treasure hidden in an old bed at an old family home we were getting ready to sell. They converged on the property and fought over who had the most right to the treasure. We didn’t know exactly what it was, and the speculation about the amount of money it was worth got more grandiose as the dream went on. Long story short, I was there when we finally got to ‘the treasure’ and it turned out to be nothing more than an old suitcase filled with mementos from my father’s childhood. The ‘treasure’ was memories. Everyone else was pissed that it wasn’t money; I was pleased with the mementos but (even in my dream) pissed that the punchline was ripped-off from that ‘One Tin Soldier’ song from ‘The Legend of Billy Jack’.
Man, I loved that song when I was in Jr. High. Now that I’m older it sounds a bit stale and hippie-naive.
Anyway, back to things. I’m bugged because I’m soon going to be separated from my dog for a week for some long drawn-out complicated reason and I don’t know that I’ll handle it well at all. I’m bugged because my grandma, who has always been one of my favourite people, is at the end of her life and all her dignity is gone. It hurts my heart to see a tough woman with a great sense of humour, who took in the needy and fed the town with crops from her garden during WWII and the 50s become a shell of a person who has to be carried from her bed to be fed, bathed and use the bathroom. She doesn’t ever know what day of the week it is anymore. She used to have a little quote torn from a religious magazine taped to her desk. It said “Seven days without prayer makes one weak.” I can’t get that out of my head right now. I see where she is and I wonder if long life is truly a blessing. I stayed with her on the farm during summers in my childhood and she was responsible for a lot of my religious instruction. She always used to drive home the point that the Bible said “Honor thy father and mother so that your days may be long on this earth” (that’s a paraphrase). She took great care of her father, even though he was something of a handful. And now her days on this earth have been long–she’s in her 90s–but is this ignoble end something to yearn for? And then I think about how she got to see my cousin’s newly adopted baby and realise that it’s not all bad.
You know that post you did recently about how everyone dies? Well, the corollary of that is that most people get old. And frail. And lose a lot of their dignity. Except that … who’s doing the carrying (feeding, etc.)? Because, if it’s someone who loves her and is doing it with the memory of who she always has been, or even if it’s someone who treats her as a still-functioning human being (talks to her like an adult, not a child; calls her “you,” not “we”; etc.) worthy of respect and proper treatment, then (IMO, of course) her dignity is intact. Only her strength has gone. Old age is hard. But it’s we, the (comparatively) young, who lack dignity if we don’t respect it.
nm, that is absolutely beautiful.
Thank you, Slarti.
Kat,
I think there’s a beautiful book in this… just waiting to be written.
And I ditto Slarti about nm’s comment.