I admit it.
I can’t call my mother. I’ve
talked less and less often with her. And I’ve struggled with all kinds of guilt
and all kinds of other emotions.
It’s painful.
It’s painful to be so far
away from her. Painful to know she is trapped inside most of the time. Painful
to know she might feel trapped inside her confusion and inside a brain that is
drying out from the outside in. Painful to experience (for the third time) the
knowing that the women in my family share the Alzheimer’s thread. Painful to
feel the ominous understanding that someday my mother will be another huge loss. And
selfishly, it’s too hard to deal with most days.
Painful to feel so helpless.
As is often the case, my work
on another – my compassion for another - taught me something profound today.
While in session, I had this sentence go through my mind, “For every healthy
SAD, you need to counter balance with healthy JOY.” And the bigger the sadness, the greater the
need for heavy duty injections of joy. Sounds simple, right? But how many of us get swallowed
by the things that are difficult? The things that make us mourn, sorrowful,
sad? It dawned on me today, it’s so easy to know sadness. But it’s so crucial
and so vitally important to find that same intensity of JOY. Intentionally find
things, large and small, that even out the pressure your mind, body and heart
feel when dealing with loss. And I haven’t proven it, but I’m pretty sure the
AMOUNTS of joy, the number of occurrences that make you smile, laugh and feel
warm fuzzies needs to be GREATER than the sad in order to bring about a
homeostasis in the soul. All of a sudden riding on that thought, I realized we
all need to give ourselves permission to find those reasons to giggle. Discover
what things, from hobbies to warms baths to sky diving or whatever it may be,
add to your well-being in order to stay healthy and balanced and “whole”.
Don’t just find joy. Seek it
out. Live it. Become it and let it keep you upright and let it elevate you on
purpose.