Listen to Let the Verse Flow on Your Podcast Player of Choice
This is a transcript from episode #40 of the Let the Verse Flow Podcast.
Today I’m talking about acceptance, especially accepting shifting tides and unsettling changes that you don’t want to accept. Today is about accepting my mother’s progressive decline into the next stages of Alzheimer’s and the fears that I have about the day when we’ll have to say goodbye. Yes, this show is about a hard topic, one that many of us (myself included) would rather forget, but acceptance is an important to come to terms with this type of loss. It’s a sign of my growth that I’m even able to talk about accepting the loss of my mother.
Accepting the Long Goodbye
It’s painful to accept these changes my mom is going through, but being present for even this last stage of our living relationship is an important lesson in what it means to really “live” your life. Be present for all of it – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Being present for acceptance of this new phase in my life is about embracing life on its terms and wringing out each and every drop of pleasure. Pleasure through presence and pleasure through truth-seeking.
My mother loves tulips, one of her springtime favorites, so when I saw them lined up in neat, sterile little rows across the street from a suburban train station, I thought of her, and the messy way she would have preferred to see them. The natural way, just growing as they please. The long trip to see my mom gives me so much time to think, too much time really before I get to see her in the assisted living facility she now calls home.
I wonder, sometimes, who will know how she felt about tulips, who besides me will know how she loved natural beauty over manufactured beauty? Who will know how she looked at trees with awe and took in the world? Only me, and a few close family members, and now those of you listening. It’s hard to think of my mom’s remarkableness being contained by the memories of only a few people, and yet I’m so glad I’m one of the people who’s been a part of those memories. It’s bittersweet.
Releasing the Artist Within
As I child, I thought my mother was the only artist in our house. Her drawings and paintings were beautifully odd with abstraction and color and attention to light and shadow. She never thought she had much talent, I think in part because she received zero encouragement about her artistic talents while growing up.
I always felt like she was the wild child in her family, and the magical thinker in the family. They didn’t know how to handle her big dreams and artistic ways, and they tried to clip her wings with lack of attention. It worked for a while but didn’t work long-term. She began to draw and paint more in her 40s, producing her most beautiful work in midlife.
I, on the other hand, was a rather reactionary kid who craved order. My early childhood was chaotic and I think what I most wanted was peace and calm. Even at a young age, I remember lots of solitary play, building with my Lincoln Logs or thinking up words for my Mad Libs. I loved Mad Libs, my first experience with wordplay. I also had a vivid imagination with many imaginary friends. Yes, I talked to my imaginary friends – heck I was an only child who craved conversation and in hindsight some safe forms of intrigue. I’d make up stories and then create imaginary characters (with intricate dialogue) and see what drama I could spin up.
In my teen years, I wrote for hours in my journals while listening to music. Even given those early years of imagination gone wild, I didn’t think of myself as creative until high school, when I was introduced to the world of Shakespeare in my lit class. Professor Longo was a brilliant English teacher, he had us sit in a circle (that wasn’t done much back then), and we would talk, really just talk, about our thoughts on Shakespeare’s plays.
I loved the forum he created because I thought my favorite Shakespeare characters were like wild turkeys run amok. Free, irreverent, uncaged. I loved his sense of freedom, demonstrated through his brilliant, fanciful writing that you could get lost in. I’d speak often in lit class (the other kids probably hated me) but I didn’t care and Professor Longo seemed to think I had something interesting to say. That’s all I cared about. At my high school graduation, I was given the award for creative writing and gifted a book of Sylvia Plath’s poems. I still have this book, and I still love Plath’s poetry.
Mom Was Always on My Side
As my writing developed, I began to see my artistic side, but I still didn’t call myself an artist. Somehow that title was reserved for painters, poets, and dancers, not business writers. Not teenage poets. Not dancers who danced around in their room or in clubs. It’s strange how we think when we are young. But during this time, my mom was my biggest cheerleader. And by that I don’t mean that she read everything I wrote and flowered me with compliments, it was more that she supported the decisions I made and believed in my talent as a writer.
If I said I wanted to write a book, she said I had one in me. If I said I wanted to go to graduate school to write documentary scripts and treatments, she said I should look into it. Looking back on it, I don’t think she believed I would be successful in every pursuit, but she supported my passion and desire to try new things. She accepted my need to explore and venture into different ways of writing. And she accepted my aspirations without too much judgment.
I’m sure she did have internal judgments about whether I’d have success in this area or that, but she didn’t share them with me much. She allowed me to have choice and to follow pathways even when I wasn’t sure where they were leading. She trusted me, and she trusted in the way my life would unfold. I always admired that sense of acceptance, but it felt foreign to me. I did venture out, it’s my way. I typically leap into action (sometimes before I know what the heck I’m getting into), but I don’t always accept things the way they are. That’s hard for me.
I’m like a bulldog; I get into something and I really dig in. I don’t know why I’m talking about dogs, cause I don’t have one. But I imagine it's like the difference between a bulldog, a miniature terrier, and a labrador. The bulldog (that’s me) will pounce around and strong-arm his way through, the miniature terrier may bark incessantly while standing still and not doing much of anything, while the labrador will take it all in and just seem to accept the current situation, very calmly. My mom was the labrador and I was the bulldog. I’m not sure where this dog analogy came from, but let’s go with it for a minute. Poor miniature terrier is out of the picture now.
My point is that sometimes you have to let go of your bulldog persona and your typical way of doing things because life has other plans for you. Your persona, your will, your expectations, and your agenda can be uprooted, and you have to make room to see life as it is. And that reckoning time has come for me. I can’t strong-arm my way through my mom’s advancing dementia. I can’t fight the two-hour commute to the deserted suburbs to see her. I can’t fight the million times that people ask me if she still remembers me (yes she does, but she might not in the future, and who wants to think about that). I can’t fight that I’m here in NYC in the neighborhood that we shared but it feels hollow and cold without her nearby.
I can’t fight any of that if I want to find the calm and peace that I need in my life to make some sense out of this very sad and frustrating time in my life. And that little girl who craved calm and peace is still very much alive. So where does that leave me? If I can’t fight things? I’ve at least created a workable situation for my mom; her life in an assisted living facility is as good as it gets. A safe, loving environment where she gets the care she needs. I can’t make it more workable than that, so my only choice for sanity now is acceptance.
The Road to Acceptance
This bulldog is out of options. And strangely, being out of options is a really good thing for this stage of my life. It may be very uncomfortable, but it’s right in showing me a new side of life that I need to learn to deal with. Rather than bulldogging my way through the next chapter of my life, I think I need to become a mixed breed – bring some of that labrador spirit and energy into my life. All roads point to acceptance for taking steps in that direction.
I think my age has something to do with all this. I have finally realized that I don’t run the show, that everything changes (that’s impermanence), and that my goal should be to adapt when needed, to temper the bulldog, and learn when to coast with acceptance.
So my mom modeled acceptance for me but I’m only now getting it! Ha, typical! And what do I have to accept? It’s sobering.
I have to accept that her memory of our shared past is gone. It appears to be a felt sense that makes her smile sometimes, but she can’t actively access it or talk about it.
I have to accept that her expressive language is severely disrupted by the damage done to the language centers of her brain from all the strokes she had. Even when she tries to tell me something, she can’t, and she’s aware that she can’t find the words and they don’t come out right. That frustration has made her sometimes just shut down. I understand that.
I have to accept that she sleeps poorly at night and may be exhausted during the day when I visit.
Then there are harder things to accept too, like the fact that we don’t hug and kiss anymore. Not the way we used to. That I don’t hear her say she loves me much anymore, that she looks at my name badge to check for my name and calls me by my daughter’s name by mistake sometimes.
I have to accept that everyone who asks about her wants to know if she still remembers me as if I need a reminder that she may not in the future.
I also have to accept that she has recently talked about dying, and on some level, she may be accepting that fate. She doesn’t say much, but on one recent day, she talked about dying. It just sort of came out.
So I have big acceptance work to do here.
One of the truest things I’ve heard about grief is that it becomes a companion to you. It doesn’t go away, it sort of becomes part of the fabric of your life. It may tuck itself in and disappear for a bit, but it always comes back, and sometimes unexpectedly. Grief is along for the ride during this period of learning to accept my mom’s condition. That longing for the way things were, the sense that so much has been lost through the loss of her active participation in the world, can feel heartbreaking. So acceptance is key. If the grief is going to stay around, then acceptance has to be its twin cousin. Otherwise, life is miserable and so sad.
Here’s a poem I wrote on accepting my mom’s current state of affairs. This poem is called Lost Along the Way.
Lost Along the Way
By Jill Hodge
I’ve been trying to tell you something, but you just look away
And with a face that tells me nothing,
Guess there’s nothing more to say.
It seems your smile is leaving, and all that they can say,
“This is how it goes, she’s slowly lost along the way.”
I’ve been asking you questions, even though I know I shouldn’t.
'Cause questions are hard. We no longer share a past.
Nothing ever lasts.
You can’t remember, is all you can say,
As you lose a thousand memories along a darkening way.
Nothing ever lasts, is all they can say.
I’ve been brushing your hair and massaging your hands.
'Cause touching you reminds me of what we still have.
And smelling you reminds me of all that we’ve been.
We’ve fought wars, advanced armies to get to this place,
But some days, you’re gone, no map, no note, no trace.
So I’m told I’ll have to be your memory.
I’ll have to be your guide, and of course, I’m there.
Your plus one, till the breath leaves, we die.
But I’d rather be your daughter, living with a blind eye.
To the torture of slowly watching as you lose pieces of your mind.
But alas, this is how it goes, I’m told.
A shell of who I remember, you’ve locked away familiar pieces,
And soon I fear you won’t know me, the clarity decreases.
I’ll accept it, yes I have to.
But I dream of your warm ways, the strength behind your eyes,
And all the times we shared when you were who you were,
and I was who I was.
We are different now, I have a new companion.
I’m told her name is “Acceptance.”
I wish we’d never met, I wish she had a different name 'cause
She doesn’t hug me like you do, she doesn’t shelter me from flames.
But thrusts me out there for the world to see,
When all I want to do is fight for our dreams.
🎬Cue the Resilience
In my situation, acceptance is strongly related to resilience. How resilient can I be as I face these difficult feelings, make difficult decisions, and live with the current situation? Resilience is the ability to cope with and bounce back from difficult situations. The problem is in this case, the place I am bouncing back to is completely new territory for me. It’s a landscape that I don’t understand or know, a world where my mom isn’t in my life. I’m utterly unprepared to bounce back from that, so I have to make friends with it. I have to get to know this new world and ease into it until it becomes familiar.
It’s like I’m exploring another planet, noting where I’ll source my water, grow my food, and find companionship. My world, especially on Sundays, feels like a desolate other world. It’s like I’m Mark Watney, remember Matt Damon’s character in the movie The Martian? He had to grow his own potatoes for food, make water from rocket fuel, and find companionship through his lone interaction with a computer diary and the disco music left behind by a teammate. That’s me. I have to find and build a life without my mother while trying to hold onto the warm glow of love, support, and compassion she showered over me.
On Good Days, the Flip Side of Grief Is Gratitude
If I flip this and realize that the reason this time is so difficult is because the times before were so special. If I recognize that I was loved, I was supported, I was handled with compassion, I realize how rich my life is. I realize how much I have been given. And that is how you turn your life story, especially the precious moments in your life story into a resilience-building structure. You recognize that your life has a beautiful infrastructure, rich with meaning and passion and joy, and just like grief, you carry that amazing tapestry and framework with you. You move through gratitude to build resilience.
So many people have so much less than I do. So many people never had a mother like mine. So many people suffer each day, and so my job is to remember the whole story. That I had my loving mother for so long, and now I won’t. I have a choice here in how I’m moving forward. I can stay in the sadness and regret, or I can take my mom’s model of acceptance, pair it with my bulldog resilience, and move through gratitude to a new understanding. I’m choosing that for myself.
My poetry tells the story of the early stages of that journey, but the journey isn’t over. In some ways, it’s just beginning. I’ve had 59 years of my mother’s love (imperfectly expressed right now but still there), and it will take time to build a new way of living in her absence, with solely an internal map of her love for comfort. Thank God I have enough imagination to fill in the gaps. The task now is for this bulldog to reinterpret all the love and compassion she gifted me with into an internal map and spirit that lives up to her depth of compassion and acceptance. In short, I have to imagine a new world invented by my favorite person and translated by her only daughter.
I know I’ve rambled on today about acceptance, resilience, and gratitude, but I hope this milkshake of thoughts and reactions is meaningful to you. If you are struggling to accept your current situation, there are lists on the Internet of strategies you can consult. Some tell you to have a gentle awareness of your feelings, to be mindful, and let whatever emotions come to the surface just exist.
Other strategies say to focus on what you can change, to gain some sense of control over your situation, or find healthy coping strategies (maybe exercise, art making, or connecting with nature). We’ve explored these strategies in the podcast before, but for today, I want you to take notice not just of the struggle, the hard pill you are having to accept but to take a broader view and think about where your resilience lies.
Do you feel better when you keep busy?
Do you find strength by getting into creative flow?
Do you learn acceptance by watching your kids or an elder you respect navigate challenges?
Do you feel the other side of struggle – the gratitude for what comes easily and the things that are working in your life?
I guess I just want you to reflect on your ability to accept your life as it is and recognize the ways the good can fortify you to handle the not-so-good.
Journal Prompts to Build Acceptance
Here are some journal prompts to reflect on accepting life as it is. You can write in response to these questions or think about them. Let them hold space alongside your grief or struggle to accept something in your life.
Our struggles may be hard to accept. That seems universal to me. How do we integrate what is good into our current sadness or frustration to take the edge off and move forward? We feel it all first, we sit with our emotions, we try to accept them, and then we pull out to see the bigger picture, and to remember that we are still alive. We have another day to experience what this life can offer. My hope is that it offers you sweet songs, poetry, companionship, imagination, art and the remembrance of a loved one’s embrace. May those beautiful elements of life transform your pain, returning you to the brighter side of the beat.🌞
Podcast Music: My thanks to all the musicians who make incredible music and have the courage to put it out into the world. All music for my podcast is sourced and licensed for use via Soundstripe.
Songs in this episode: Thoughts Of You by Renderings; Slide by GEMM; Tai Chi Evenings by Sam Barsh; Pyaar Kee Seemaen by Cast of Characters
Related Episodes:
#2: Losing My Mother: A Catalyst for Personal Growth
#4: Sitting with Shitty Feelings
#15 Grief & Gratitude (It’s Bittersweet)
LTVF Season Two Music Playlist: Check out the songs that inspire me, and connect with artists from many genres who add to our collective, human soundtrack.
Listen to Let the Verse Flow on Your Podcast Player of Choice
Check out the resources on this website (and subscribe) to get podcast episodes, poems, articles, music playlists, and journal prompts delivered to your inbox.
Then, connect with me on Instagram. Let me know you hear me out there!
Journaling Resources
Jill Hodge
Sign up for the Let the Verse Flow Newsletter and get access to all my articles, including this free 30-Day Journal challenge (with starter writing prompts).
Jill Hodge
Sign up for the Let the Verse Flow Newsletter and get access to all my articles, including this free journaling guide.
Let the Verse Flow is a community-supported, independent publication launched in June 2023 by Jill Hodge. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website and newsletters. Members are vital to building a rich community of diverse voices. Join us by subscribing today; consider a paid subscription to support the community if possible. Thank you!
