Here I am in a world of my own choosing. In the past I have lost track of time, I have seen days turn into weeks turn months and become years. I have lived my recent life as though I was a ninety year old, I have felt what it feels like to have nothing to look forward to. I have watched the world as though I don't belong anymore. I have felt powerless in my own existence.
When things get too much for my grandmother she'll say 'it's time I went'. She says that a lot, it doesn't take much for something to become a too much for someone with dementia. It is a joke but it is not a joke either. It is how she feels and it is her life. She will say, 'I've out-lived my family by years' (I don't count in that assertion for some reason). Simply put she is waiting to die, she is hoping for it, any day now. She writes notes most days, 'Upon my demise...'. They are almost always word for word the same as the last. If I want to get her some new clothes she'll tell me that what she has will 'see me out'.
I took on her way of thinking somehow. Some sort of symbiosis perhaps. Time just carries on regardless. She could sleep for a month and she wouldn't notice any difference on waking up. I would measure a week by thursday's trip to the shops and putting the bins out, by getting out for tea with a relative, by waiting on a reply from my brother. Shit it was bad. Time just drifting and me just drifting with it. Repeating the same motions, explaining the same situations, watching the grass grow. Trying and trying to make sense of a brain where sense is on a loop, ignoring my own situation, looking to the wrong (oh how wrong) people to help it make sense, waiting for a break, for someone to say 'I'll do that for a bit' and give me a while to get away from the constant present.
There are people who care and there are people who have absolutely no conception of caring. Those who have no conception of caring still believe that they care, because they do, but only about themselves. When they help someone it is so they can be seen to be helping. They'll help if it suits their own agenda, if not they will take issue with being asked.
The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.
The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.
Hold on to the centre.
I knew a girl once who's way of living was to take whatever she could from whoever would give it to her. She said that she hated the fact that someone would do another a favour simply in order to be owed a favour, and that was her excuse for never doing anything for anyone. She was beautiful, physically, so got a lot of attention, and she had a lot on offer to take. Maybe she still does.
I got an email from my mother today, I've never had one before, it is the first time she has contacted me this year. I read it and deleted it. It's content did not surprise me. I used to listen to my family, my mother and my brother, I thought that they had my interests at heart in what they said to me. It wasn't until I started to look after my grandmother that I began to see things differently. I spent months and months trying to make sense of the way they behaved toward me from that time. It was my mistake: I had always thought that they cared, which of course they do, but only about themselves. My choice of life made them uncomfortable, it didn't fit in to their image of me and so it challenged their image of themselves. They would not see it that way, it would be too much to comprehend.
They have a kind of dementia of their own, but they aren't 90 years old, they didn't spend a night a night at the foot of the stairs and have a few vital connections in their brains severed by the fall and the cold. I won't reply to her, and not out of spite, simply because I do not feel that I would like to give her my attention.
I'm sure she'd forgive me though, if I was to strike up a conversation, after all, I'm under a lot of pressure.
The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds.
It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.
