A light for the pathway through

Yesterday I went to see a peer counselor at a place called Kara, located in Palo Alto. It's a non-profit whose focus is on supporting those who grieve. I'd been harboring a grim reluctance to go to this appointment. But afterward, I felt a measure of peace. The counselor Kara paired me with is a woman in her 50s who turned out to be a deeply empathetic listener. I told her about the flashbacks I have of my mom, movies that play in my head of scenes from when she was so gravely ill. I told her about how I try to ignore them, or push them away--and how doing so creates conflict because having a memory of my mom (even a distressing one) is better than not having anything of her at all. She asked me to tell her what it was like to care for my mom, and I didn't know where to begin. "Ask me some questions," I said. She did and in answering her, I found a way to start.

I told her about the 18-20 hour days, the days when every minute was taken up with medical appointments; meal planning and preparation; medicine fetching or dosing or planning; linen changing; laundry; sibling politics; housekeeping; working when my mom was sleeping; trying in the midst of it all to stay connected with my sweetheart and sometimes failing that. About praying to a God I didn't believe could even hear me and praying the next night anyway. I told her about the inexorable diminution of my mother; the terrible intimacy of knowing better than my siblings what my dying parent needed to soothe her pain or anxiety or breathlessness; the exhausting disorienting daily battery of new symptoms and new measures to keep those symptoms at bay; the tiny rejuvenating oases of normalcy that love and friendship brought; the terror and helplessness of being an untrained nurse in the home of a desperately sick person whom I loved and who was never going to get better. As I talked, I felt a familiar tug. It was part of my psyche taking the injured part of me by the hand and quietly saying "Come on. Let's go where it's safer." I know that place. It's a realm just a hair's breadth from now, a place just slightly removed from the actual present, a safe buffer away from the immediate; a damper of pain. But I resisted that old call and I stayed right there in the present and I told and I felt what I was going to feel. It was exhausting all over again and it left me dizzy. I had to sit in the car for a while afterward and let the color seep back into the landscape of my life. I'm supposed to meet with this counselor again this coming Monday, and the Monday after that, and every Monday to come until there comes a day when I realize I won't need to meet with her again. A part of me looks forward to this. The rest of me does not.