Two Families, One Story

Last week I was involved with two different families, helping both of them with difficult situations and seemingly impossible decisions.

One woman struggled to even consider the plan that her husband of many years will soon be moved from their home and into an Alzheimer’s care facility. Along with her reminiscence of their married life together, experiences with her parents and the related childhood traumas were flooding her mind every day and waking her at night.

One of the many challenges of grief and loss is that each new grief-causing loss will trigger a memory and possibly a re-experience of previous losses and pain.

I think grace correlates to acceptance, and the pain correlates to denial. The greater degree to which people have grieved previous losses and come to a place of resolution with that which is hurtful and out of their control, the better able they are to integrate those past experiences with the current. Without this, all the unresolved hurts are blurry and confusing; the past becomes present, and the current is suppressed.

A man is challenged by the fact that his wife is dying. Her neurological condition brought on sudden and rapidly progressing dementia and hallucinations. The resulting behaviors and beliefs have caused this woman to refuse medications, food, and water. She has lost a significant amount of weight in a short period of time; systemically, she’s at great risk of going into life-threatening crisis any day. All of this has occurred and progressed in just a few weeks time.

End-of-life care is often hard for families to provide. In this case, the man knows that his wife does not want to be resuscitated at the time of death, yet he cannot easily acknowledge that she is dying. It is happening too suddenly for him to comprehend. He is focused so completely on trying to understand what is happening to his wife and how to ensure that she’s getting appropriate medical and personal care, there seems to be no place for contemplating her death.

These are stories of love and resistance. The love is remembered, resurrected, renewed. Feared loss is feeding the resistance. I believe, however, that love can never be lost; I believe that it will be found to persist.