38. Valley walking

ONE DAY AT A TIME
Meditations for Carers
 
38. Valley walking

Psalm 23.4

I’d been feeling really down for days. Even though he seemed not too bad. Then I realized that what I was doing was grieving. Dementia takes your loved one away from you as truly as divorce or death. The only difference is that your loved one is still there, so you can’t let your feelings out and get them healed. The result: a festering wound.

The person you knew and loved has pretty well gone and in his or her place is this new, unpredictable, and sometimes scary, stranger. Many other illnesses have a similar result. And you’re supposed to go on as if nothing has happened. It’s as though aliens have landed in the neighbourhood and done a selective people-swap and your loved one got swapped and this alien has taken his or her place. What
you’re feeling is a sense of loss and you’re grieving.

The experience of dementia has been called ‘the long bereavement’ and it is, as are many other degenerative illnesses. The only way to deal with the grief of bereavement is to face it squarely and give yourself permission to feel the feelings till they’re ready to go away. Is that what you’re doing? That’s okay. Me too...


Taken from One Day at a Time: Meditations for Carers by Dorothy M.Stewart