Coping with Grief after Alzheimer’s - Grace in Light and Shadow

copyright © 2013 Sarah Elizabeth Malinak, all rights reserved.

Because I’ve written about my mother’s journey through Alzheimer’s disease here, I wanted to acknowledge her passing here as well. I thought that when she made her transition I would experience joy for her suffering to be over and relief that my own suffering over her condition had come to an end.

But, for me, that turned out to be a myth I picked up somewhere along the way. Toward the very end, I feared her death because, even though she was hardly really with us at that point, having some part of her seemed better than not having her at all.

When I got the phone call that she had died I had two responses. One was to review over and over our last meeting a few days previous. I don’t know what I was looking for there but I couldn’t let it go. The next response was to get really busy helping plan and carry out her Celebration of Life service. That comprised six days.

On the seventh day, back home here in Asheville, I decided to go to a movie and relax. When I got out of the movie, on the way to my car a terrible sadness filled me – a sadness accompanied by a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. In the days that followed that feeling came up again and again until I finally began answering it with, “I am not, in fact, a motherless child!”

As a child of divorce and having gone through my own divorce many years ago, I have experienced grief. Because of incidents in my childhood, grief has been a constant, though usually quiet, companion my whole life long. But this grief is different and it gives me respect and compassion for anyone whose experience is different from mine.

We really do not know how grief affects others. It’s the number one reason that presence is absolutely the most important gift we can give someone who is grieving. No words can match the gift of simply showing up, listening, paying attention and, perhaps, seeing something that needs to be gotten done and doing it.

In fact, something we can do for ourselves when experiencing grief is to show up and be present to ourselves, giving ourselves as much love, compassion, and tenderness as can allowed in any given moment.

Thank you for reading this blog entry and the others where I’ve explored Alzheimer’s and my response to our situation. In the days ahead, I look forward to renewed energy, creativity, and a new and purposeful focus on topics I can share here at Grace in Light and Shadow – because, thank God, Grace doesn’t leave anything untouched.

Blessings,

Sarah