Eventually, those fog banks in my psyche concentrated themselves into a dense wall of black, looming ominously on the horizon. And all those aching, unidentified emotions were tightened into such a Gordian knot that only bold action stood a chance to untangle it. But…which thread to pull first?
And as a side note — I was also trying to hold all this at bay while I continued to work and manage the tasks of life. But there was no longer any stuffing them back behind any dam. They were out and letting me know there was more coming. So in my private moments, I painted, and tried to make sense of what was happening. And I learned that the longer you wait to begin, the tighter the knot binds itself together.
So, my choice was simple.
Do I spend the rest of my life avoiding “whatever it was,” forcing a smile, using “mind over matter” to pretend all was fine, and ignoring any evidence to the contrary?
After all the see-sawing of emotions I had been totally unaware of, the final surprise was what came next — the silence. In that immensity and intensity of whatever this was about, it silenced me, and I had no words.
So I painted. And painted. And painted. And gradually, a few words seeped out.
I guess I expected that, like after Dad’s death, I would feel relief…or maybe more correctly, peace and serenity, given how it all ended.
While his aftermath was the relief of a threat finally extinguished, hers was the completion of caregiving done honorably. Though we parted with many unresolved things, I felt such peace at her transformation at the end…a kind of redemption from the rest of her life.
So I expected something more like: “It is done.” With both parents gone, and it being the end of that whole era, I should be able to “get over it,” “move on,” and “leave the past behind.” All those things people say, as if just the fact it is finally done means it is “over.” But nothing was further from the truth.
Instead, there was an intense explosion of a whole mess of emotions, ranging from love and grief, compassion and confusion, to anger, disappointment, abandonment, and back again to grief.
Author photo of Mom’s High School Graduation picture
Death – the alternate reality
“Lorazepam.”
That word rattled my brain and took me right back to my Mom’s death in 2021.
I tried to snap back into the present moment, as I was in the middle of a visit with a dying friend. She apologized for her mental fog.
“I hate the meds…they make me so fuzzy…but it helps. Something with an L…”
A family member sitting nearby said, “Lorazepam,” and explained it helped calm my friend’s agitation.
I remembered the drug, and knew the emotional place they were in — the concern about: “Should you give it?” …”How much?”…”How often?”…”Is it too soon?”… “Am I causing harm?”
There’s no question that modern hospice practices are a blessing for the dying and their family. But the dying process itself has its own struggles. After a lifetime of always focusing on healing someone, now you have to wrap your head around helping them die. We spend our lives encouraging our sick family members to eat, take vitamins, and see the doctor. Then at the end, you have to do a rapid reversal and stop giving food, ease off liquids, and stifle every impulse to offer a medical intervention. It’s the right thing to do, but it goes against every instinct we’ve been trained to follow, and it’s even harder if you’ve spent your life as a medical professional trying to heal people.
As I walked back to my car, the word Lorazepam pounded in my brain. Yes. That was the first hospice medication I had to administer to my Mother as she was dying.
It all came back as if it were yesterday. Mom’s discomfort. The meds. Her prayer in her semi-conscious state:
“Help me, Mother Angelica…”
***
Can you hold the pain from a lifetime of emotional distance and hurt, along with your empathy and love for that person, and care for them as they die?
The shit-show
Maybe it was in keeping with the hand that life dealt my Mother that her death process was doomed to be difficult. In terms of getting much assistance from her local hospice, it was a shit-show from the start, even though it wasn’t their fault.
It was Wednesday night, March 7, 2013, about 7 pm. We were heading home in the morning. I had completed my part in “Dad’s death process,” honorably. But at the moment, he was being a real bastard to the young hospice nurse, and we needed to calm him down. So we headed back to the hospice facility.
How long’s this gonna take?
He had early dementia and was dying of stomach cancer. His care had become too much for Mom to keep him at home anymore, and his end was getting close. So, my husband and I had traveled to their home in Pennsylvania to help my Mother move him into a local hospice there.
The Maria Hall Hospice facility was a peaceful place, located on the grounds of the Motherhouse for the Catholic order of nuns there — the Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in Danville, PA. My Mother’s sister had belonged to that order before she died years earlier in a tragic car accident. For the last several years, my parents had been living nearby in a retirement community run by that same order of nuns.
In his typical fashion, he was being difficult to the end. When we moved him in on Monday, he glared at me from his chair and said,
“Well, what do I do now?”
I suggested rest.
On Tuesday, as he lay there, he looked up at me and asked,
“So, how long’s this gonna take?”
As kindly as I could, I simply said, “Well, Dad, I don’t know. That’s between you and God.”
Self-portrait by the author, shortly before the illnesses and deaths of her parents
For most of my adult life, I was the warrior. Strong against him because I needed to be. I tried to get him to go for help. He wouldn’t. I was forced to draw a line in the sand to protect our kids.
But emotions are never so clear-cut, and life was always a pendulum between walking away and maintaining some kind of extended family relationship for our son’s sake, and… let’s be honest, mine, too. Because unless someone has no redeeming qualities — in which case it’s easy to walk away and never look back — if that person has also “done good things at times,” and used the powers of intermittent love and trauma bonding on you since infancy, it’s a lot more complicated.
I tried for “middle path” – allowing love, but standing guard. I was determined to be strong, and never again be that “trapped, weak, passive victim from the past,” nor let any one else be put in that same position. And yes, at that point I judged my younger self harshly and with no love.
But it all grew exhausting. As I got older and life had battered me over the decades, my husband noted that my self-portrait above bore a resemblance to a battle-weary soldier’s thousand-yard stare. I kept pushing me, but at the same time, a question I kept shoving to the back of my brain haunted me:”What happens when I am no longer strong?”
In my first “baseline reading,” I spoke of emotional flashbacks. But, another fairly frequent “trauma companion” is nightmares. I’ll share more about them later, but as part of this “baseline,” I will give some background here.
While decades of therapy have healed much, nightmares still show up fairly often. Having dealt with them for years, I am *almost* used to them — at least most of the time. And generally, I shed their emotional upsets pretty quickly. In fact, in some of my recent ones, I even show up more as a fighter now than as that victim from the past. So, I guess that is progress.
But sometimes a nightmare will come along that can still blindside me with an emotional knock-out punch. That’s an indication that there is something I still need to work on because nightmares reveal where the heart is still bleeding.
The Trigger: Trip Planning
Yesterday I set up travel plans for us to go to visit our son in Savannah to celebrate my 70th birthday. Now it should be a short story — decide to go, settle the dates, make travel and hotel reservations, and then go and have a wonderful time. Yes. Maybe for many, that is the way it works. But…
For years I have struggled to “ask,” whether it be for help, for something I want, for some I need. It’s taken years but I am getting better at it. Yet even when I can now ask, I still struggle to feel I “deserve.”
So it was no small thing for me to say that I wanted this trip for my birthday. In fact, it was a major victory. I wasn’t interested in presents or big parties, just being with my immediate family — my treasure in life. But about that whole “I deserve” thing….
I’ve spent a bit of time in my posts talking about who I am, why I’m writing, how to do this book, why now, and what kind of tools I need.
Why have I “wasted” so much time on those things?
Maybe this post can answer that question. It will be the first entry in the book and sets the stage for the first chapter — Packing for the Journey, which will include the information I mentioned above.
Photo by author, of her lab manuals over the years
Before I could create my toolkit, I needed to have a handle on the full scope of the challenge.
Writing is the heavy lifter of excavating the wisdom….but what do you do when you can’t feel…when you can’t reach the emotions locked away…when you may not even realize the emotions are there?
And worst of all…even if and when you can get at them, what do you do when they so overwhelm you with pain and intensity that you are rendered mute in your trauma…you literally cannot find the words to fully express and release what is flooding through you?
That is where I started this journey. And so many times I just walked away because I didn’t know what to do. It felt almost impossible. I say “almost,” only because I had been here before in life and I knew there was a way to bring order to chaos – that whole “Pick a nipple” experience decades earlier.
Thumbing through that tan notebook from my son’s infancy, its pages starting to come loose, I felt hope that I could find the right way to do this, that an organic structure would suggest itself.
Certainly, this book couldn’t be like writing a nonfiction “how-to” book. Nor was it a “sit-at-the-computer-open-a-vein-and-it-would-all-neatly-come-pouring-out” process. It needed to run wild before it could show me how to proceed. But even “running wild,” needed some boundaries.
I wandered around the house and stopped in front of the ham radio receiver from the WWII tank that my Dad used for years. I stared at it on the shelf, played with the dials. Tactile memories stirred. And yes, there is the question: “Why do I have that WWII tank radio receiver in the first place?” That was no small clue.
The music on my laptop drifted in. Songs from 1965, 1966, and 1969 brought me right back into those years. One particular one came on. Several nerves twitched. Suddenly I was 12 on a violent Sunday afternoon, cowering in my bedroom.
A copy of Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World was on the next shelf — one of my treasured 1960s Scholastic Book Services purchases that I’d kept. Again…why did I hunt these books down — these very editions? Why did I need them?
Carefully opening the book, I shoved my face right into the middle, right against the pages and inhaled deeply. I just love the smell of books from the 1960s — the ink, the paper, the age. They don’t smell like that anymore. But as I took in that sensory moment, I was back in 7th grade at Sacred Heart School on a fall afternoon, trying to sneak past the nun who told me to stay after school.
Each item on that shelf — smelling it, feeling it in my hands — generated a force that surged through me, as if these objects were Talismans infused with the power to take me back and reveal secrets I’d long forgotten or locked away. Talismans. That is exactly what they were. Objects of power to open a door.
To Tame the Chaos, Will “Pick a Nipple” Work This Time?
I made my peace with the decision to write, and answered the questions, “Why now?” and “For whom?” So all I needed to do was tell the story, right? But…which parts? In what order? To mean exactly what?
I started this process overwhelmed with chaos. Lists of questions, a lifetime of details, photos, and journals, many paintings from the last several years, objects from a lifetime…simply an abundance of material that seemed worse than herding cats.
The dilemma: HOW do I make a story out of this? A story that shows what happened, how I came back, and what I have discovered, all while telling it in a way that matters to readers. Because ultimately, this is a story for all of us.
In times of greatest stress, we fall back on what we know. For me, that is lists, maps, lab techniques, details, and art. Yes, an odd mix of left and right brain tools.
Let’s start with “lab techniques.” Probably one of the most stressed-out times of my life was as a new Mom trying to figure out how to “pick a nipple.”
Soul Mosaic 