Magical Thinking

My birthday is Monday.  I turn 47.  There is some debate whether 47 is mid-40s or late 40s.  This is always time of much reflection for me.  As extraverted as everyone thinks I am, there is much intense internal work.

This birthday is bittersweet.  I love birthdays - friends, family, celebration, cake, candles and ice cream. We start home health care for Mom this week.  Even though we wanted to get home health care in their 9 months ago and it's been a fight to get the insurance reinstated, now it's real.  There's no going back.  Not like there was ever any going back on this path of dementia.

And I remember my birthday 3 years ago.  Voyageur and I walked into my mom's financial planner's office to discuss Mom's finances.  We were handed a packet of her finances.  On the 2nd page was the total in her investments.  My heart was in my throat and tears filled my eyes.  The money my parents had saved for so many years had shrunk considerably in the beginning years of Mom's cognition failing her.  Don't get me wrong, she will be ok - but it took some serious wrangling and getting a third party Conservator to set her on the right course.

And for whatever reason, there is a part of my brain that tells me if Mom's finances are ok, she is ok.  I don't know if you have read The Year of Magical Thinking - I saw Vanessa Redgrave in the Broadway play a few years back - there are times Joan Didion's words could be mine.   'I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant.'

With my birthday approaching and the realization of no turning back on Mom's care, I got kinda morose this past week.  Stuck in some endless loop - and then I received a Facebook message this past week from a minister who shared me a link to a recent sermon she gave.

What I wish for you when you face loss and unwelcome changes is that that magic might work in your heart just enough to show you a future you can endure. Not one that will be just as it was. Not such a rosy future that you will in time be glad of the sorrows that came into your life, although that happens sometimes, with some losses, even very deep losses. But just that you will be able to see yourself, a new version of yourself, living fully in a future that you have fully entered.

When I read that, the floodgates opened and just as sometimes getting older is resisted, I have been resisting the inevitable progression of Mom's disease.  And as there is a deepening and a beauty of getting older, there is a beauty of dementia - realizing life is incredibly precious and not to waste one moment.


And since I am the PollyAnna in the family - although I'm coming to believe that Mom is the biggest PollyAnna of the 3 of us - as I saw Bonnie Raitt at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley - here is Nick of Time

Back at ya awakened Voyageur :)