such a gift

then

now

I’ve just returned from a 3-week visit with my brother and sister-in-law (see my previous posts). Because of their differing stages of dementia, I bussed daily between two care homes near the city where we brothers were born. Advance reports had prepared me for their utterly changed appearances and mental states.

Once past my initial queasiness I grew to cherish the intimacy of spoon-feeding one and wiping streams of saliva flowing from mouth and nose of the other. One would lie like an infant, legs waving in the air, drifting from sleep into wide-eyed curiosity. The other would restlessly wander about, testing door and window locks, adjusting picture frames, offering Hellos to passersby.

No day was like the one before, no time of the day predictable or as hoped-for. Most time we recognized each other in some way, shared denture-less smiles, chuckled at unspoken jokes, whispering bits of childhood songs, mimicked the other’s gestures, deciphered incomplete utterances.

♥

To this moment I’m amazed how much I enjoyed their company. I grew to genuinely love them as human beings: not as confused relatives near death. In response to their naïve ways my natural self emerged.

Pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers, my first teacher on the path, named this realness and congruence, the presentation of our true thoughts and feelings, both verbally and nonverbally, to another person. Not only the words we say or how we say them, but also our facial expression and body posture. It means sending another person the real picture of ourselves, not a distorted one that differs from how we really think or feel.

“Being real,” Rogers wrote 60 years ago, “involves the difficult task of being acquainted with the flow of experiencing going on within oneself, a flow marked especially by complexity and continuous change.” [1]

To put all this into context, a brief family history: We grew up in post-war Germany — my sister-in-law in the Soviet-occupied sector which became the communist DDR — into single-mother families marred by war-time trauma, ‘fallen’ and damaged fathers and uncles, food scarcity, crowded dwellings, and inept childrearing practices. Set adrift as teenagers, we found our separate ways. Over the years we’d visit occasionally, drinking and kidding to preserve our shaky identities, strictly observing the “three days for relatives and fresh fish” deadline. We liked each other well enough, but speaking from the heart we did not. Mentioning family history was discouraged. Silent treatments and slammed doors, par for the course.

♥

What a blessing then, to be reunited at their bedsides. With each precious moment in their presence, my ego dissolved into mere humanness. As if by magic, suffering blossomed into happiness. This change came about without my doing: pretense and artifice simply dissolved. As I write, a week later, back home in bed with the flu, this sense of liberation persists. Rumi says [2],

“Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief, disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises.”

.

[1] Rogers, C.R., & Stevens, S. (1962). (eds). Person to person, 91. For a discussion of Rogers’ work as it relates to mindfulness, see: Tohme, O., & Joseph, S. (2020). Authenticity is correlated with mindfulness and emotional intelligence. Link. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. [2] Aksapada. (n.d.). The analects of Rumi, 135.