DISCORDANCE

I should not be sitting here doing this.  In fact, I should still be in bed, Saturday morning, and my chance to recenter (in bed, sleeping… yes, this does help me recenter).  But this morning as I lay in bed with a small dog on my head, it was words that swirled around in my brain, not letting me rest.  I know I am in a time of discordance when the words won’t stop forming themselves into sentences because words are my solace when I have nothing else to turn to.

And if I am not in bed, then I should be doing one of the million other things that hang over me like the sword of Damocles, but instead of being paralyzed by fortune, I am simply paralyzed, afraid to move for fear that the balance will tip and the sword will fall and I will lose my precarious grasp on sanity.

These past few years have been a time of self-reckoning, a time of self-discovery, and a time of redefinition.  For those of you who followed Part One of this crazy adventure you know that I have maintained radio silence for a bit.

When I decided to become a full-time student over a year ago, I did not realize just how little time I would have for self-maintenance, let alone how I would again lose my words. My words were replaced by textbooks full of mitochondria, cells, chemical equations, logarithms and dead frogs. I am pursuing my passion of science, have discovered a great love of math, and generally am finally paying homage to my penchant for researching anything and everything I find of interest. For the past year, I have redefined myself in terms of my intelligence – something which I have never acknowledged or realized – as future Alzheimer’s researcher, as a woman who has the ability, the capacity, and the gumption to make a huge contribution to the world, so that others may not have to go down the path of hell that my family and so many families have gone done with this disease broadly categorized as Dementia in its many forms.

In just over a month, I have yet again been forced to redefine myself. This time, though, I do it in a way that I never anticipated and that I am having difficulty understanding on an emotional level. Intellectually, I understand it, but I am unsettled by it. I find myself defining myself in terms of my mother’s death, and her life. Beverly Ann Black was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about 6 years ago at the age of 55. It changed my life in ways that I could never have imagined, and which I have explored to some extent in my previous blogs. On July 20th of this year, on my parent’s 43rd anniversary, my boyfriend of several years, Roy, and I exchanged vows with each other in a very small, private ceremony. I talked to her the day before, one of the last conversations I had with her, and told her that I was getting married the next day, on her anniversary. She whispered into the phone, 12 hours from me, “Isn’t that something?” and then she told me she loved me. As sick as she was, she somehow could always get those words out to me.

That night of my wedding, my father called to tell me that my mother was in the hospital. The next day, she was evaluated and admitted to hospice care at her sister’s home. One week before the end of my summer Chemistry class I took an incomplete, missed the final and drove to Florida to curl up beside my mother and whisper stories in her ear as she lay dying. Sometimes, as brand newborns, babies will smile and we quite often say it is just involuntary movement; reflex. I’ve always liked to think, though, that somehow they are responding to the contentedness and peace they feel, even if it isn’t a conscious thing. And as I whispered to my mom, holding her hand and resting my head in the crook of her neck, every smile that came, though her eyes were looking somewhere far ahead to a place I could not see, I liked to think that somehow those words, and my presence, gave her a peace when she smiled, much like those newborns.

Life forced me back home August 7th and at a little after one in the afternoon on August 8th, my mom finally left go. She had the gift she had always dreamed of – her siblings, her husband, her children and her grandchildren were all with her in the room the day before she died. If there is one thing that I will always regret it is missing being with her in those last moments but she knew that I had come. At least, I have that.

Two weeks later, a new semester has started and my physiology, genetics and pre-calculus classes wait for no man (or woman). K again had a rough transition going from summer to school and after a mad jump from a moving car after declaring he wanted to kill himself instead of going to school, and several days of physically manhandling him into school, my days have been spent rearranging life to try to get him the help he needs to find his center. They are filled with days of appointments, class, mad dashes to and from schedules, and, of all things, Special Olympics bowling team practice. He is blessed to have a bowling partner who is so similar to him it isn’t funny (except that his buddy seems to lack the pyromaniac gene, thank god). To see him finally interact with someone his own age, who gets him… it is a gift that soothes my heart.

Special Olympics Bowling Team Partners

To top it all off, Roy and I have a contract on a new home and hope to be moving at the end of September. It will give us the space our family needs to spread out and find ourselves as individuals as we move through this hectic time.

It is only with the love and support of a few close friends and my husband that I have managed to stay upright (sometimes kicking and screaming, but every once in awhile every one needs a little tough love). I could not survive this somewhat sanely without their love and care and I am amazed every day at the guardian angel who seems to make sure that at the times I feel I can handle no more, I find the strength.

These words, these memories, they are my therapy, and between the 6am swim practices, the bowling practices, the volleyball and archery practices, the homework, classes, and house packing, I will somehow find the time to capture the stories and the memories so that, when I begin forgetting, I can always find them again.