Faith Works 9-14-19
Jeff Gill
The long good-bye
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There is a peculiar grief you feel when someone you love stops recognizing you.
It is a loss, and we've all learned that grief is not just about death, but about farewells and letting go (the Toy Story franchise has certainly taught us this if we didn't know it already).
We can grieve over a job lost, a move to a new community, the end of a relationship by mutual agreement. And as a pastor, I am often needing to tell people, when they ask "how long will this take?" the not always welcome answer "as long as it takes." Grief is a process much more than it is an endpoint, until we get to that eternal conclusion before the Throne of Grace.
To lose a person you can still visit, that you still can talk to, in a way – that is different. I won't say harder, but it is simply different, and for someone who has dealt with a severe grieving process, this can indeed feel impossible in comparison.
Dementia is the overarching category, Alzheimer's disease being one of a number of forms dementia can take. The words are used interchangeably, and I'm sure health care providers feel like most ministers do, that it's not worth correcting. It is worth noting, though, that many forms of dementia are not Alzheimer's and can even be temporary, or at least will follow a very different path.
We're all seeing more dementia, and in that tragedy is some good news: we're living longer. Plenty of people in years past would have ended up with some measure of dementia, but cancer or heart attack or some other ailment killed them before it became apparent.
Still, there's much concern and confusion over what it is, and how to handle it. I still use the old doctor's warning: aging is when you forget where you put your car keys. Dementia is when you forget what car keys are for. Memory loss alone is not necessarily dementia, though it can be a warning sign.
Dr. Oz on television has recently spoken out about his own mother's memory loss and apparent Alzheimer's disease. He has helpfully noted that even a trained medical professional can mistake early symptoms, and be vulnerable to that great enemy, denial. He just couldn't believe it was happening until it was so deeply rooted there was little they could do for her.
I've known the pain of sitting in an assisted living facility and looking into the eyes of a much beloved family member, and realizing "she doesn't know who I am." It hurts, there's no better word for it. And the pain makes some people run away; our local nursing care facilities are evidence of that in the visitor logs.
And even to go through that with a more recently made friend can be hard, and at the very least disconcerting. I still remember when my dad took me to visit an old family friend, whose problem they learned was a stroke and the brain damage done by that physical affront; she not only didn't know us when we visited her room, when we ducked back into the room not a minute later, she didn't recall the visit we just had. I was 21 and beginning a journey into understanding and trying to deal with dementia then, and all the years since has not lessened how much it hurts to realize how little we can do.
But there is something. Medications are being tried with some effect in slowing neurological problems; other medical interventions help when small strokes, chemical imbalances, and other more subtle attacks on memory are the underlying situation. We need in churches and our community to let love cast out fear, and to lovingly talk to each other about memory loss, dementia, and end of life decisions while we still have the wit to make them for ourselves.
And to visit even those who do not know us. The person in that chair may not know who we are, or why we're there. It can be hard, even painful. But if you honor a God who knows, whose knowledge is intended for love and forgiveness and grace, then that Divine One knows you are there, that you went, and it was worth doing.
Even when the world doesn't remember why. God knows.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been in most of the nursing homes in this county and the adjoining ones, and he'd love to see more of you visiting there, too. Tell him where you've been visiting at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
