What Alzheimer’s Can Do for You
Here’s what Alzheimer’s did for me
–It turned me into a poet,
A poet for the people.
For we are folks, we are the ones who live with the consequences, unwanted, brought about by politicians, law-makers, gangsters, bad people, bad choices, circumstance, and Disease.
In our case, Alzheimer’s, which worms away inside until the body and the mind begin to crumble.
Then the “victim” begins to suffer; and we with them. Both of us must learn to cope. Together.
How do you cope?
Well, you go through the stages with your Loved One who has Alzheimer’s: confusion, denial, anger, etc. Until you both have to do something, something else, something other than grow ulcers. The sufferer needs care, stimulation – physical and mental – and you, now the care giver providing the stimulation, the comfort, and everything, need to stop “going crazy.”
You must find an outlet for yourself, some relief from the relentless, often isolating ‘job’ of caring, because, until the “patient” is in the most serious decline on this seven-step “journey”, there is not much relief. Nor, often, help.
But some good can come out of Alzheimer’s.
What it has done for me, it can do for you. You only have to find your own way.
One way I wish I could follow is to carve animals and faces to provide tactile experiences for the blind. Some residents in ‘our care home’ are blind. As In, you could hand the person an animal carving and say, Here Ted, can you identify it? Or hand him a carved face and ask, Is this face male or female? Young or old?
So many hours in a lonely day to fill.
And for those Alzheimer’s sufferers who aren’t blind but who are in the forgetting stages of forgetting, these carvings would provide an excellent, added, stimulus. People in this delicate state will kiss and caress the fond memories in a photo album. Like some of them do with dolls; they treat them like actual babies. It is a comfort for them, a reversion, a sort of back to the womb trip.
But, since arthritis and time constraints prevent me from carving, I turn inward. And in doing so, I discovered that I do have inner resources. I can express my hurt in words. And I can rhyme words. That makes poetry.
Poetry can express hurt most eloquently, as witness the hurting poetry down through the ages. Read some elegies.
Read some of the greats of the poetry world, such as W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, John Donne, William Dunbar, Robert Frost, Thomas Gray, John Keats, Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas.
(part of a list compiled by Michael R. Burch)
All of whom found solace and comfort in writing an elegy, a dirge, a remembrance.
Here is one example Burch provides which, he believes, is in the public domain. He writes that the poet who was not a poet but an orphan at age three who never got a formal education in her Baltimore home city, but who wrote it on a bit of grocery bag for a young Holocaust survivor who had just heard that her mother had died, never published and never filed a copyright.
#9 — Do not stand at my grave and weep
by Mary Elizabeth Frye
Do not stand at my grave and weep:
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starshine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry:
I am not there; I did not die.
—
One believes that the poem gave solace and eased the burden of grief, at least somewhat.
And that is what I sincerely hope that some of my folksy little poems can do for people. They do it for me.
And what’s more, you will notice that rhyme helps the memory too.
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