Having an Alzheimer’s disease patient in the family is an opportunity for others in the circle of love to evolve to the limits of our potential. You know why?
- Caring for the person whose mind now functions through dementia, is a chance for us to become less self-centered and more others-oriented.
- By attempting to respond positively than snappishly or correctively when he or she engages in repetitive conversation, or causes problems with incontinence, or exhibits other behaviors perceived as trying or abnormal, we set in motion the potential to learn the high art of patience.
- Connecting with the being whose memory loss is chronic, degenerative and not to be annulled, enables us to learn how to accept situations that cannot be changed, and to accept previously unacceptable behavior – that which is being incapable of being altered in others.
- Efforts to continue a relationship with the one in altered consciousness is also lesson in love: It is a means of mustering love feelings for another in spite of, or because of, or irrelevant to the haywired, hit or miss psyche.
- In our fast paced, future directed society of long-term materialistic goals, we who are in senile company are required to slow down. We are dancing with those who can teach us to experience and appreciate life on a momentary basis. Typically, they can remember for only a moment. If there is to be a rapport, a rarified exchange, we have to adjust to their not-so-quick tempo. In doing so, we begin to observe and be grateful for momentary joy – the seemingly small but spiritual high victories for those upon this sojourn.
- Closeness here can instruct us about judgment as well. Christine K. Cassel, a physician writing to her peers on “Ethical Dilemmas in Dementia”, in Seminars in Neurology (Vol. 4, No. 1, March 1984), said this about casting judgment on the demented: “It is dangerous to judge someone else’s quality of life by one’s own current standards. Different persons have different values and sources of life satisfaction. We cannot assume that these are lives not worth living. Values change as life experience changes. Perhaps, it is wrong to evaluate the experience of life as a “downhill” course from the patient’s prior vigorous existence.”
In reality, that “victim” might be a spiritual guide, an important instructor, who has stayed on in the physical body longer than the body would will it – if, in fact, the body has a will – to teach lessons of the spirit to others. The true purpose of those with dementia might be far beyond the drama of the personality and physical body.
They are not to be pitied, forgotten, placed apart from the “normals” or even, like the STruldbrugs, hated and despised; but channels of light to whom others pay homage, object of honor who possibly live in sacrifice to teach and touch the hearts of those they love.
Source: The Quest Spring 1990,
The Theosophical Society in America
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