Do Not Go Gentle
Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
I’m not sure if my mother ever read Dylan Thomas’ famous poem, but she is being true to its spirit. At ninety and in failing health, she is wrapping herself in quiet rage, determined not to let the minutest amount of joy seep in, despite the best and most loving efforts of her family. Calling it geriatric depression may relieve us of any false guilt, but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.
As I look around, I see that most of my fellow boomers are dealing with one form or another of caregiver’s stress. One friend saw her elderly mother lose a painful battle to cancer. Another’s mother is in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease, and no longer remembers her.
Making comparisons about which form of misery is worse is pointless. They all hurt. Despite Dylan Thomas, most of us want our parents to have peace and contentment in old age, and a gentle end. Ultimately, we hope that for ourselves as well. Yet few seem to be so blessed. As my sister put it, “The exit strategy sucks.”
Perhaps there is some sort of divine strategy in transitional pain. When my sister and I were struggling in the throes of raising adolescents I said to her, “Maybe it’s Nature’s way of preparing us to let them go. If they were as easy and adorable as they were before the teens, we’d never be able to bear them growing up and leaving.” Maybe something similar is going on with elderly parents. If they were independent and living life to the fullest, we might never handle the inevitable end. As it is, there will be relief mixed with the grieving.
Which is why I recently revisited a small gem of a poetry book: Crossing Arcs: alzheimer’s, my mother, and me, by Susan McMaster, (Black Moss Press, 2009). I met Susan in 2012, on the PoeTrain to Cobalt, Ontario. It was a delightful, crazy, exhausting and stimulating weekend during which Canadian poets and musicians travelled together on the now defunct Ontario Northland Train from Toronto’s Union Station to Cobalt where we celebrated the arts, especially the poetic variety, with panache.
Although Alzheimer’s was not part of my experience at the time, I bought Susan’s book because it was so good. It combines quotations from her mother, Betty Page and responsive poems by Susan with photographs by Marty Gervais, to convey the journey taken together, yet separately, by Susan and Betty. The book is a collaborative effort, written with the full cooperation and permission of Betty as she raged against her disease. It expresses all the anger, humour and grief common to the Alzheimer experience.
Betty’s statement are concise, insightful and poignant: “I know what it’s like from inside, but not what it looks like from outside”; “I’m an animated film without a story”. Sometimes they are humorous: “My health is fine. I’m as healthy as a pig in rut. Just let me get a man. Too bad most of them here are old….”
Susan’s poems are elegant, cutting to the bone, as in “Hands,” which describes her mother’s final goodbye to her house before moving into a care facility. It ends with the lines, “I put my arms around her–/her hands, between us,/ still closed around something/no-one can hold.”
If creating, as I wrote in last week’s blog, is an act of defiance against the darkness, then Crossing Arcs throws down the gauntlet by celebrating her mother’s spirit even as she grieves her slipping away.
