I sent the note below.
I sometimes feel compelled to take a deep, reluctant breath and send people stuff like this. Most often, they don't like it. It feels unsympathetic (I'm not corroborating their horror or stoking their sense of suffering, and I'm egregiously off-script relative to their internal movie). Sometimes they really don't like it, and stop being friends with me. But sometimes it helps a lot (this time it did). You can't coax someone to reframe without going off-script.Even if your mom can't talk or be "responsive," it's still her.
A person never loses her subjective presence. To the extent that she is aware, it is your mother's unique and familiar awareness. It can't be the awareness of "some other person."
In our awareness, we remain ourselves, whether or not there is communication. We have that (we couldn't lose it if we tried!) until death. The mouth speaking, the body moving, and the brain thinking are not who we are, they're just things we do. Don't confuse who a person is with what a person does!
[I sat here blankly for a moment after writing that sentence. I didn't move a muscle or make a sound, and my brain went nowhere. Yet my continued existence was palpable - perhaps more so than before - in that repose. More on brain farts here]Ask yourself: when you enter her room and don't apply your eyes or ears, is there a sense of someone in the room? If so, is it valuable? I can assure you that her silent presence will be the thing you most miss once she's gone; much more so than any specific thing she expresses. And you still have this!
Jim, you are so right.
ReplyDeleteMy husband died last summer, and what I miss most is just his presence.
Irene,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all: sorry.
But, yup, unless your husband was, like, Solzhenitsyn, it was never the actual content of his words, was it? For any of us?
When loved ones are in so-called decline, and no longer acting "normally", it seems loopy to me to imagine they're no longer them. Who else could they possibly be?
It stems from the common misapprehension of what a person is. We're not a collection of thoughts or memories or preferences or any of that. I've been the EXACT SAME PERSON since I couldn't use chopsticks or drive a car, and every atom in my body was different. We're not what we do or what we know or what we believe. We're presence. We're awareness. We're the framer, not frame-able.
And apologies. As I wrote the above posting, I was aware that I was expediently blurring the truth by saying "presence remains until death". As I wrote that, I made a mental note to unravel my expedient lie in some subsequent posting. Let me try to make it up to you.
Give this a try if you have the time/interest. Read the eulogy I gave for my mom (https://jimleff.blogspot.com/2019/07/i-wrote-in-hrefhttpjimleff.html), and don't ponder it as an intellectual proposition. Really put it to the test.
Your beloved was not my mom, so it's not a perfect match. But I believe (this is where it gets esoteric and I'm gonna lose some people) that presence is not something the body produces, like saliva. It's not what scientists call an "emergent characteristic". Bodies are in consciousness, not vice versa. Consciousness is at an entirely deeper level than somebody's body (again, this body right here bears no resemblance to my body at age 10, but I'm absolutely me). So...seek and you maybe shall find.
Most people, in groping for some connection to a departed loved one, make the mistake of hoping for a CHATTY DIALOGUE. "Should I sell the house?" etc. You can't get that, because that's CONTENT, not presence. The person is no longer producing content! But if you reach not for content (the hair and smell and tone of voice and opinions and shared memories, etc etc), and strip away any preconceived notion of presence being tied to a body, you may discover that presence is always blowing in the wind.
Coming at it from another angle....it should be obvious that we create myriad ripples in the world via our actions, even the subtle ones. We are the ancestors of all that comes after us. The entire universe reverberates from our aggregated choices. Thus our presence is encoded. So while content's gone - that movie has ended! - presence is another thing. Don't be so quick to deem it vanished.
I apologize for glibly glossing over the issue to make my larger point. This part is obviously a bit of a digression, and a harder swallow for most people. Be well.