LOSING FEAR

I've never worried about getting old. I spent most of my worry energy on being young. Once I survived all that, I was so relieved, I never worried about all those usual other things. Getting old was never on my worry list.

I always liked old people. I liked them like I liked cats and dogs. I felt safe around them and they were emotionally rewarding. And I always knew of course that they were my great teachers. A discontented complaining old person is just as fine a spiritual teacher as a peaceful fulfilled elder. You just learn the lesson of them and you ask yourself, "Would I want that to be me?" and you figure it out from there.

Even so, I'm kind of surprised to find I've completed 24 years of being an elder companion. Just walking along at the pace of someone else, living an 89-year-old life for the day or the 24-hours or a month. Twenty years plus and not a moment of it has been wasted while I've been with the old and sometimes the very old and sometimes walking quietly all the way to death and stopping just short of the gates.

It's all been worth it. It has brought me a lot of peace, even though other people's families are sometimes heart-breaking to watch. Even that can be soothing though. It reminds me that my family were not so different from these people. Troubled, struggling, doing their best and their worst, becoming great souls or shriveling into tiny empty heart. Not so different.

 

When I started to live at Hannah's house, the first person I ever knew with Alzheimer's, I had no idea it was the start of something big, and lengthy,  and  limitless.  I just thought of it as a cheap rent gig. Then I became involved. Then it became more. And longer. And deeper. And the deeper I went. into that other land where dementia people live, the more fearless I became.

You see, when I was young, I was always filled with terror. Well, not when I was very young. But after I was four and everything had changed and everyone I had known was gone, and my name was not my name any more, and my mother was not my mother, that was when the terror began. Not just the daytime among strangers, often angry and needy, but the night-time and the hours of darkness too. Lying awake watching the light beneath the door, watching for the shadow standing outside the door. Terror.

 

But that's all over now, of course. But I will say, next to all that, really dementia is nothing. Even if I myself eventually come to have dementia, it won't hold the terror that my early life did.  

Really, it was all of that which made me a person who didn't fear much any more. Illness, death, spiders falling into the bath with me  -- easy. Well, okay, I am trying to be honest here, so I will admit that when a spider falls right into my bathwater and starts swimming towards me, yes, there is a little flourish of panic there as I scramble out. But in general I am not afraid of spiders now.

I am not afraid of insects, snakes, poverty, death (mine or someone else's), speaking to a crowd of any number at all, being in foreign countries where I don't speak the language. I am uneasy at night unless my dogs are around  -- but that too is nothing to do with today. It was part of the terror when I was young. That was then.