The catastrophic illness/incapacitation/financial situation of a former partner draws me back
(after 7 years away) into ongoing, intense, incredibly difficult contact that challenges me to avoid re-enmeshment.
After a brief siege of scorching days, the weather has been deliciously moderate for an Ojai summer–hi 80’s instead of low hundreds. Still, I find myself driving down to the coast (about 20 or so miles) most days. There, for hours at a stretch, I wander along the tide line of any one of the many beautiful beaches from Oxnard up to Santa Barbara. I walk, feet in Teva sandals being washed by the gentle comings and goings of the ocean.
At the ocean’s edge I cannot hold even half a thought in my head! The rhythm of the pounding surf, its vibrations resonating in my body. Endless sky and endless water. Cries and scurryings of shorebirds, breathtaking flights of fluidly reconfiguring pelican formations, glimpses of dolphin and seal playing just offshore in the near distance. All these dissolve me into a wide-open, utterly permeable no-particular-self.
This month I have sorely needed these profoundly nourishing respites.
I’ve had two long-term, live-together, seven-year relationships in my life. Over the many years since each of them ended (one in 1973, the second in 1984) my exes and I have maintained ever-changing connections. With the ex-partner with whom I had the very fraught and equally transformational relationship I spent the next 13 years trying to find some way of staying in an ongoing, balanced friendship. Seven years ago, after having supported her financially (with almost $40,000) and emotionally through three periods of breakdown (all connected with her recovery of memories of severe childhood physical, emotional and sexual abuse) I knew we had to find some less enmeshing way to honor the deep connection between us.
The ever-increasing ease and abundance in my life contrasted too painfully for both of us with the continuing pain and struggle in hers. For her, this led to demoralizing comparisons that kept her from appreciating the measure of her own remarkable healing. For me, the increasing gap kept re-stimulating an unhealthy, misguided sense that, because my life was working so well for me, it was my ”job” to do whatever I could to help make hers work better for her. I had long known and been shown, repeatedly–by Spirit and by reality–that this was both not true and not possible. Still, I would–over and over again–keep having to fight my way through the same ensnaring fog.
We agreed to let go of any ongoing contact. We acknowledged that we’d forever be connected spiritually as “family” to each other. And, we agreed to allow Spirit to be in charge of whatever incidental meetings we might have in and around our small community. Since both of us are somewhat reclusive, these meetings seem to happen only two or three times a year. Each time, we visit for some part of an hour–usually on the street near the post office, in the parking lot of the health food store or in our little small town library.
Being able to separate and walk away from the living together relationship, from the ongoing friendship and finally, from our incidental meetings without feeling immersed in the intense, heart-stopping anguish I’d always felt as I connected to/with her pain and struggle–this has been the most incredible healing process in my life. It has taken years for me to let her life be hers, to not identify with/take on her suffering as if it were my own. In individuating from her and from my suffocating enmeshment with her, I have been–simultaneously–individuating from the suffocating earlier enmeshment with my own biological mother. And, as the years have unfolded, I have watched myself extricate myself from any other friendships that were even slightly tinged with this lineage. From anyone who seemed–even very subtly–to simultaneously “idealize” me, negatively compare themselves to this idealized version of me and, then, judge, belittle, criticize or emotionally undermine me. My friend Carol (with whom I’ve shared the tales of our lives for 33 years) calls all of this the crowning and most remarkable healing work of my life.
Still, for all the considered reasonableness of the decision my ex and I reached, I’ve always known in my bones and heart that there would be yet more work to come. I’ve known that, even though I am six years older than she is, she would come to dying before I did. And, I’ve known that when her death came, I would inevitably be drawn back into some more complicated involvement with her. I’ve lived with this knowing as a muted background all through these past seven years of minimal, only incidental contact.
The “second shoe” dropped in the first days of July. A parking lot meeting with her in mid-May had earlier let me know that something was radically “not right” with her physical health. She was incredibly emaciated, barely able to hobble about using a cane and looked as though she’d been in a car wreck. She went, after that meeting, to do some work with both a psychic healer and my Feldenkrais practitioner. Both of them treated her free of charge. On the first of July, with the help and encouragement of an old friend and of her neighbor/landlady, she finally decided to risk consulting a western physician. This after almost 35 years of no such contact. This after several months of increasing and increasingly intractable, incapacitating pain in her swollen right forearm and her left hip. Until that moment, she had believed that the pain was coming from her body releasing a whole new round of returning abuse memories.
The diagnostic x-rays she underwent the next day showed metastatic cancer in the bone of her arm and in her lungs. Her excruciating pain prevented her getting on the table for the abdominal and hip x-rays that might have given a clue both to where the primary cancer might be and to what might actually be causing the hip pain. She called me that day in shock and at a loss as to how to go forward. She’d been unable to work for six weeks, was running out of money and was clear that she was interested neither in being hospitalized/anesthetized for diagnostic CAT scans nor in undergoing any chemo or radiation treatments. She was ready to squarely face the process of dying. She wanted my help and support in that journey.
Because she has only a somewhat estranged niece in the mid-west and because of her oft-repeated tales of her utter isolation and friendlessness, I’d always imagined that I would be alone with her in this process. In fact, this is not the case. Four old friends–three of them from her teens and twenties, one from ten years ago–and her neighbor/landlady have all joined forces with our local Hospice to help her now nearly completely bedridden self to stay at home for as long as possible. Inpatient Hospice care will be available when and if that is needed.
The others are variously involved with physical and social support, food shopping, computer “leg work” and real time meetings with various social service agencies, helping her to shower and to care for her cats. It’s me that she has chosen to entrust with the powers of attorney for her health care, financial and after death decisions as well as with her current money matters. This has involved a good deal of paperwork. And, as well, my having to interview her in order to answer the various questions on the many applications that needed handling and arranging for a notary to come for a house call. Because she was essentially running out of funds, she had to apply for Medi-Cal, Food Stamps and Social Security Disability (SSI). There were also forms to apply for becoming an after-death donor both of her eyes and of whatever other tissues and body parts might be useable for scientific, medical and prosthetic research.
We began doing all this paperwork in the midst of Hospice trying to find a cocktail/combination of drugs that would bring her constant pain down to tolerable levels. The pain, the highly agitating irritability that seemed a side effect of some of the pain meds, the agitation she felt at having to do all this bureaucratic busywork in the middle of preparing to die, her baseline of angry bitterness about the inordinate suffering and pain of both her life and of this death that is confronting her and her incredible frustration with having to be so profoundly dependent–all this made the process we had to go through an intense and crazy-making one for both of us.
Her eruptions into rage–at me, at the process, at the system, at all the unfairness in her life–all were completely understandable. But, they were also familiar from our past together. In those earlier days together–and in similar times with my so similar mother–I would respond to such rageful, abrasive, abusive, upsetting critical lashings by “understanding the context” out of which they grew. At the same time, I would, as well, be catapulted into a frantic, almost terrified internal response. That frantic terror would send me scurrying to trying to “make it better” or to trying to “do better” at the task of helping when I wasn’t supposed to be seen as helping.
With these current moments, I watch myself respond in completely different ways to the outbursts. I sink deep into some place inside myself that is at some considerable remove from her, from her behavior and from my connectedness to her. Peering out from behind my eyes, with my little one completely distanced and enveloped by my loving mommy-inside, I can patiently witness her upheaval. I can feel some kind of distanced, “generic compassion” that is completely separate from any personal connection with her. I wait till she is done with the outburst and then resume whatever it is that needed doing. No terror, no frantic-ness. When I leave after these outbursts, I feel my own anger at the abusiveness. And, invariably, I think to myself, “If the cancer doesn’t kill her soon, I surely will!”
In calmer moments, I am able to tell her how hard it is for me to be around this behavior. Even as I understand there isn’t, at the time, anything much she can do about it. That the behavior makes me want nothing more than to pick myself up and leave, leaving her to her own devices. In these calmer moments and often just after an outburst, she can apologize and commiserate with how it is for me to be in the middle of one of her “brain-storms” of rage. Can regret how much of her anger I was present for all those years ago. Can wonder at how it was that, being who/how I am, I was able to live with that so very angry being she was then. These seem to be profoundly healing interchanges for us to be having with each other. But they are incredibly charged and intense.
When at last–after six days in a row of this(!)–we were done with the push to have all of the application processes in motion, I began making sure to be there only twice a week. Making sure, too, when it was possible, that I would have some days in between visits. It has helped enormously that she’s finally on a mixture of medications that manage her pain without creating so much irritable agitation. The “brain-storms” still come occasionally. Now, she tries to forewarn me and to talk herself down from them. It is still difficult for me to be around them. Yet, it is absolutely clear to me that I am to be in the middle of this until it is done, that this is Spirit work for my own healing.
She now spends most of her days lying propped in her waterbed moving in and out of sleep. In and out of reviewing her life and making amends for past actions that she would now do differently. We talk easily about her dying–both of us share a lack of fear about our own or anyone else’s deaths. More so than some of the others involved in helping. She hopes that death will come sooner rather than later. As do I and everyone else around her since bone cancer pain in its later stages may not be manageable in ways that leave her with enough consciousness and clarity to feel her way to the end. This is what she most wants: to be conscious and awake to her passing from the physical plane. She is doing the inner work to make that possible.
Part of this reviewing work has been her reminiscing about and regretting some of the struggles and disruptions in our old relationship. Her wishing that things might have been different so that we might have been able to stay together. Listening to how differently she holds that time from how I do–even as she is able to acknowledge this difference–is not easy for me. I am glad when she moves on from these sharings. They seem to invite an intimacy for which I am not at all available now.
She is often more easily able to ask me to do things that need doing because I–the Queen of Particularness–give her no grief about how exactly everything has to be done. Others of her helpers have had things to say–in truth or in jest–about how “compulsive/rigid” or particular she is. They haven’t quite seemed to see that all this particularness is about having things be reachable or findable when she is alone with her incapacities. That it is, as well, about keeping some semblance of familiar order in a life suddenly becoming more and more chaotic.
The ease with which she can ask me to handle fixing the floor tiles in her bathroom, washing her floors, cleaning her toilet, defrosting her refrigerator washing her waterbed sheets and remaking her bed, setting up her trash and recycle arrangements–all this has also to do with our past history of me being allowed to help her in ways no one else could be allowed to know about. Actually, I’m quite fine and easy about all this. Glad to be able to do my Harriet-Housemouse routine! In truth, I much prefer it to the intimacy of talking about the past!
It only stings with re-stimulation of the past when someone else is there simultaneously “just visiting” and not being asked to do things for her. When I talk with her about this, the “reason” for not asking the others to do things is always that they “are already tired from working all day and dealing with their own lives” before they come there. The familiar-from-the-past inference, of course, is that since I’m the Queen of Rest and self-care I have more “room” than anyone else. This reverberates the years of my taking on more and more of the chores in her always-workaholic life in the hopes that it would allow her more open time for us/me. Always then she’d fill that opened time by giving it to others whom she perceived as more “needy” of her than it seemed to her that I was.
I watch the past return in me in these moments. And, I see the importance of taking my usual full week of unplugged time-out in the middle of all this. My absence makes the room for her to do what is harder for her, what she has told me she knows is her challenge this time around: to ask people other than me for the help she needs.
It’s all so incredibly intense. Dealing with the old and new behaviors in her. The old and new reactions and feelings in me. The endless phone calls to the various social agencies are a piece of cake compared to the emotional work that’s part of every minute there with her. And, until recently, part of endless moments when I wasn’t there: I couldn’t for a while put down worrying about the details that needed tending even when it wasn’t “my watch!” Now I can mostly “put it/her down” unless I’m there or I have some particular “assignment” for between visits.
How I’ve been dealing with all the emotional stretching and exhaustion has been to disengage from all my other relationships right now, except for those with my clients. My friends all understand that I have no room to talk about or listen to any journey tales these days. They pray for me and for her. They pray for release for each of us. They send loving, supportive energy for which gift they do not need acknowledgement.
I work, able to fully immerse myself with my clients. I read even more fiction than usual since that turns off any obsessing I might wander into. I walk the tide lines. I sleep a lot–often for 10 hours a night. I nap even more frequently than usual. I often have dinners (in or out) from favorite restaurants in town so that I am well fed even when I don’t feel like feeding myself. I get my usual massage and bodywork sessions and then even have some extra ones.
Beyond everything else about it all, is how exhausting it is for me to witness someone living my worst nightmare. Needing help for everything one is used to doing for oneself. Being so completely dependent on other people. Having to struggle to communicate just exactly how one really needs things to be or to be done. Having to describe to others how to do things that are usually wordlessly part of your unthinking routines. The frustration when they just don’t get what you’re trying to tell them. The knowing that things will only get more this way as time unfolds. In an odd way, I seem to be doing the working on my issues with needing/asking for/receiving help by going through all of this vicariously as I am witness to her process with it all.
I watch her doing better and better with it. She falls apart with fears and anxieties about how she’ll manage financially and physically as–and for however long–this goes on. Then, she comes back to the moment and does extraordinarily well in the middle of the horrors of increasing incapacitation and of growing dependency. She is overcome with amazement at the outpouring, from so many people in her life, of support and caring and awed acknowledgement for how she is holding herself in the midst of this all. She’s feeling appreciated and recognized and valued in ways she never has felt before this catastrophe. This is a bittersweet reality for her: she has had to get this sick to discover her value and importance to her old friends and to other people around the edges of her life! Still, I am profoundly grateful that she is getting to experience that this is so. And, I honor how she is being able to move through this greatest challenge in her already incredibly challenging life.
When she does die, I sense that I will be set free in some very profound way from the lineage of which she has been such a part in my journey. I look forward to the uncharted territory of living my own quiet, rich and nourishing life without the background long-term psychic expectation of this challenging “return” looming, of waiting to be called back “in” after all these years.
I cannot even begin to imagine how it will feel to move into this new era of my life. How it will be to be able to move around town and my life without having the less than fully conscious uneasy anticipation of running into her. The uneasy anticipation of having to be ready to listen to–and to stay separate from the suffering involved in–yet another tale of painful disappointment or new disaster in her always so-difficult life. To no longer feel such disquiet and unease about sharing or acknowledging the joys I feel in my own life.
I am sad that she has had to suffer so much for so long. Sad that she has to suffer this painful way of dying even as it brings her a richness that she has been missing till now in her living. Yet, I feel no grief at her immanent death. Only the sense of a coming relief, much as I felt when my biological mother died. In the middle of this, I come to my days with her with an abundance of this “generic compassion.” With my willingness to do whatever I’m able to help her with her living until/into her dying. With my willingness and my readiness to be as authentic as I am able to be and as truthful as she is available for me to be with her, whenever she is available for that.
As with so many of these past months this year, there is in me a sense of the “bigness” of the moment. A sense that this is another watershed moment in my journey. A time and an experience that is mirroring back to me just where it is that I am at this particular juncture.
I am particularly struck by the level of compassionate presence that seems possible on what feels to be more a “generic” rather than a particularly personal plane. I’m not sure that this is the most accurate way of describing the relatively unemotional, unconnected context in which I hold the “she who is dying.” But, at the moment, it’s the closest I can come to communicate this odd way I am being present. (At least when I’m not being caught in the re-stimulating of the emotions of our shared past!) I find it all quite mysterious and miraculous.
Originally published August 2004
