As her life fades, the effects of the passage are showing. Wearing away the edges of her personality and memory. The disease process, the medication and the necessary disengagement have changed her internal topography. None of us know exactly where to step. It’s as if her illness rearranged the furniture and we trip over things with the old floor plan still rooted in our minds.
This venture is trying. It is not sequential or orderly. Unsettled, we grasp eagerly for anything familiar that comforts her, for substance we can share. Our common experience diminished as the majority of her internal journey is now solo.
Of course in this transformation it is not an intellectual breakthrough or crack in the collective consciousness that will comfort her – or us. It is the mundane, the familiar and the absurd. It is Jeopardy and Judge Judy. Black and white, logical, simplistic and in the moment, they are what is needed to steady us on an otherwise unfamiliar path.
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