Moving Through Pain

"I finally saw that to make it through the pain, I had to be more like water and less like ice." Mark Nepo

Nepo is talking about the pain of having a rib removed during his treatment for cancer, but the above quote can apply as much to emotional pain as it does to physical.  There is more pain if we resist.  If we go with the pain, there is still pain -- but it is less immobilizing.  There is much pain in this process of dementia.  Pain at seeing the person we once loved become someone else.  Pain as the demands of caregiving constrict our own lives.  Pain at seeing the person with dementia becoming more and more disabled.  Someone has called it the long goodbye.  It certainly is that, and there are grieving opportunities all along the way.  I am trying to implement Nepo's advice.  Now when the care receiver demands something impossible, I just let it go.  I do not try to reason, I do not try to coax --- I just listen.  Certainly things are not the way he would like for himself.  They are not the way I would like for myself either, but this is what we have -- and it is folly to resist it.