Washington DC
As for the first mark of call, the task of changing
the way the world thinks is obviously impossible and I’m not even sure about
being able to change me or my own community.
As for the second mark, my two memoirs on doctoring, Healing
the Wounds and Not
All of Us Are Saints suggest that I have the gift of exploring my own
inner world and making it accessible to others.
And finally, this vocation explores the pain of the world—not only as my
family, community and I will experience it but also as the circles of people
that form around any person with Alzheimer’s experience that pain. To my delight, writing these blog posts over
the months has been a great joy.
Sometimes, it seems that, here in the present, Pollyannaish as it sounds,
the disease itself is a great joy.
So creating this blog or my website and any speaking
or teaching that I do are my call at this point in my life. I am to be the voice of this illness in the
present moment. To communicate it to the world.
To stay in touch with my reality and share it with others. To invite people into less fear and
embarrassment around questions of this illness.
I’m finding a joy and contentment in this process that has been absent
the last few years, when I’ve had to struggle to do the hard work of writing. It flows fluidly and easily. For now, as I have said repeatedly over past
posts (“Shame
and Humiliation,” “Joseph’s
House and It’s Interns,” “Telling
My Sister Laurie,” and others), I am finding great joy in my life,
something that had not been true much before this diagnosis.
I'm not Pollyanna; I know there will be much else to
this call and to the disease, some of it ugly.
Not everything is sweetness and light, even now. I can
hardly trust myself to put anything down—backpack, gloves, hat, slippers—even
for a moment. If I take off my gloves to
tie my shoes and turn to put the gloves back on, they’re not there. I have to look around. It’s not that I put them in weird places (yet)
or that they disappear forever. It’s that
I have to make a conscious effort to remember where I’m putting something; the remembering
doesn’t happen automatically. No, it’s
not all sweetness and light.
So there’s joy in the presence of pain; for now that’s
enough.
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