LETTING GO IS THE WAY TO CONQUER

LETTING GO IS THE WAY
TO CONQUER LOSS

A Widow Bit – Feb. 24, 2008
By Mary Koch

I am sleeping in my mother’s bed.

Correction: I am in my mother’s bed, but I am not sleeping.

It’s been a half-century or more since those childhood days of taking refuge in my parents’ bed if I had a cold or flu. It saved Mother from having to run up and down stairs to care for me.

Now I’m back in Mother’s bed. Dad is gone, and it’s a single bed. It is not the haven of security and comfort I remember from my childhood. Now it is Mother, not I, who requires care. She has been moved to what is called the “care center” (read “nursing home”) of her retirement facility, and I’m staying in her assisted-living apartment.

Her move is considered temporary, and we expect both of us to be back in our own beds soon.

It is anger that keeps me awake. Anger tinged with fear. Fourteen-year-old anger that I thought was long gone. Seems it was only buried. I am reliving the helplessness I felt when my husband, post-stroke, was subjected to institutionalized care.

Care is not a commodity. Not real care. We’ve tried very hard to make an industry of it, but that doesn’t work. Care must come from the heart with the force of a burbling spring that cannot remain underground any longer. You can’t quantify it, bill for it, or buy insurance to get it.

A friend called this week. Her mother had a stroke and is about to be released to a local nursing home where my friend briefly worked. “Everything depends on who your CNA is for the day,” the friend observed glumly.

She nailed it. The irony of our health care system is that the aides, the people who are lowest paid, have the biggest responsibility and impact on patients’ daily lives. Most of them realize that. Too many don’t. Or perhaps, given the pressure they’re under, they can’t all remember all the time.

It is heart-breaking to walk into a nursing home and spot your loved one sitting idly in a wheelchair, lined up with all the rest: anonymous, frail folk who can no longer do for themselves. Seeing my mother thus is like picking scabs off a wounded place in my heart that will never heal.

I am kept awake by the past and the future. Will I be ready for this most difficult passage, when life is a sequence of losses? Loss of health, control, independence.

I finally do sleep, and it is because I rest in the hope that framed the final years of my husband’s life.

He taught me this, not in words, but by how he lived those years imprisoned in a paralyzed, mute body: There’s a difference between losing and letting go. Loss is when things are taken from you, when you have no choice.

But when you choose to let go, especially let go of that which you’ve already lost, you gain the freedom to cherish all that you still have.

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