Your Dying Spouse 3 - Meet Thyself (Five Minute Friday)

Back at Five Minute Friday, hosted by Kate Motaung (www.katemotaung.com).

Today's challenge is to write for five minutes on the word MEET.

My further challenge is to incorporate this into an ongoing series on dealing with a dying mate.

Well, here goes.

Meet thyself.

Usually we think of knowing ourselves, but when we start the dark road to death with our spouse, the trip for which there's a temporal 'after' for only one...there are things in our character that we'll meet as for the first time.

Some of them aren't pretty. But pridefully denying them is the devil's mirror.

Take resentment. Living with someone who's dying, someone you love, someone you'll miss terribly, will grind anyone down.

You may wish to take their burden on yourself, but you can't. You can help where possible, but mostly you watch, and your heart tears more with each day.

It's natural to resent the process, the illness, but the target is kind of amorphous.

So you resent the person.

Yes, it's illogical, unfair, an un-Christian. But this is how most people cope.

And it is a coping mechanism. It's a way, futile to be sure, to fight back against something that's hurting YOU.

Meet thyself.

And be gentle in that meeting, for you are no monster, hating the helpless. You're a victim of the illness, just as much as your mate.

Be gentle with yourself, because you're important.

Not just as a caregiver.

As YOU.

Your Dying Spouse 2 - Vital Words (Wedded Wednesday)

If you expected to find a post on faith today, I apologise...I found something the other day that I wanted to get posted while the strength of conviction was fresh.

They are simply the most important words a dying person can hear.

I was listening to an audio version of Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture". Close to the end he was describing the "last lecture" itself, which he delivered at Carnegie Mellon university...on the day after his wife's birthday.

That special day, probably the last they would have together, had been a travel day. It didn't rest easy with Jaye, his wife, but she accepted the importance of the event, and flew in on the day of the lecture.

At the end of the talk, Dr. Pausch made note of the fact that his wife's birthday celebration had been sacrificed, and he asked the audience to sing her "Happy Birthday", and asked her to take the stage with him.

As they embraced, she whispered in his ear.

"Please don't die."

If you have one thing to say to a loved one who's dying, please say that.

We're linked to Wedded Wednesday (www.messymarriage.com).

When Your Spouse Is Dying - Part 1

Not exactly the most cheerful title, eh?

But the fact remains that dying is what we're constrained to do, and if you're married, one or the other of you will start that journey first.

It's not a pleasant process, and I won't sugar coat it with Hallmark Card sweetness. But, to quote Tennyson, some work of noble note may yet be done. I'm going to try to help you get there.

My qualifications? I am dying, myself, and am trying to understand the road, to ease things for my wife.

This isn't just a series to help you offer a kind of martyred comfort to the dying, taking the burdens on yourself. This is intended to help YOU survive with your health, your heart, and your conscience intact.

Dying's nasty, but while it demands compassion, it doesn't confer entitlement. It's a Bad Trip, but shouldn't be a guilt trip - for either of you.

This is to help you walk into a future that's certainly unwanted, in the form it's assuming, but one you'll have to live in nonetheless.

Some of the topics we'll cover will be:

* Faith - being terminal changes perspective

* Interests - that which you've shared may fall away, and you need to be true to yourself

* Distancing - it happens. He or she is dying, and you're not. We'll look at how to avoid the almost inevitable survivor's guilt.

* Sex - it can be very hard to be physically responsive to a dying mate. And terminal illness can make intimacy seem irrelevant to the dying...which can be hurtful to you.

*  Future Plans - what to share, and what not to share. Hint - if you've already got a replacement lined up, don't share that.

I'm going to leave this open-ended; your comments may inspire further topics, and I would like to be thorough.

So, next time...Faith.

A Door To Hope (Five Minute Friday)

Time for Five Minute Friday, hosted by the inimitable Kate Motaung (www.katemotaung.com).

Today's keyword for five minutes of writing is DOOR.

Losing hope is getting too easy. Too many nights awake with pain as a companion, too many mornings when the operative phrase for the day's duties is "this is gonna hurt".

And it all starts afresh tomorrow. Sometimes I confess...I don't WANT to.

But my days are duty days; duty to support my wife in her new career, duty to the rescued dogs the Almighty has brought to our door, duty to the people who have found a helping hand in my writing.

Duty to hold dear and valued the riches that permeate my dwelling-place.

Nowhere is "feelin' good" mentioned, because feelings - and health - are transitory.

You do your  job, the one God apportioned.

Hope comes through Him, and Him alone. And He touches our lives through our being His hands.

His work. Our duty. My honour.

Honour is forever.

And my duties, carried out with a full heart, are the Doorway to Hope.

Still having a hard time getting back to reply to comments, but please, please do leave them.

Quality Time? (Wedded Wednesday)

They say that no one, on his deathbed, wishes he had spent more time at the office.

It's maybe true, but it's not as self-evident as it seems.

When we're courting, hormones and emotion pull us to spend as much time together as we can...
and when we're not together, we're thinking about each other.

And we think it shall always be thus.

But courtship is not a 'natural' state. We're still pretty much who we  were before we met that special someone.

Marriage changes our lives, but it doesn't immediately change US. That happens, if it's going to happen, over time, and with conscious intent.

I am a case in point. One of the failings in my marriage is that I convinced my wife, and tried to convince myself, that I could change, through Love, from a maniac who exercised for three hours after work, and then worked on airplanes until three a.m.

I did change my lifestyle, yes, but I hadn't changed, and like ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, unhappiness spread.

You can't go from an addiction to work to an appreciation of leisure by wishing it.

In the end, I was a happier person, and a better husband, at the distance engendered by my frenetic nature.

Illness has not changed that. While I appreciate the beauty and poignancy of my limited moments, sitting on the sofa and holding hands just isn't on.

Do I wish it were different, that I were different? Sure. But you do your best with what you have, and hindsight is not 20-20.

It's legally blind.

This post is linked to Wedded Wednesday at www.messymarriage.com.

On Fear

This will be a short post. It was a hell of a weekend, and I am using that term deliberately.

I am scared. Pain is really not controllable any more, even with the best will and hardest attitude, and I'm spending a lot of time in a savage twilight, conscious but reeling, like a boxer who's taken too many straights to the head.

The Bible says fear not, for I am with thee.

Franklin Roosevelt said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

A few years ago there was a line of products with the logo "No Fear".

Nice words, and no disrespect intended to Scripture (or FDR, for that matter), but some things are flat out scary.

Jesus was scared, too, at Gethsemane, so I don't feel so bad.

And no combat veteran will ever claim fearlessness. Combat is the ultimate terror, and you're either scared, dead, or lying.

I used to think it wasn't being fearless, but how you handled fear.

That's too simple, because it implies that at some level there's a measure of control for every situation.

But some things go beyond the boundaries of control. Everyone's got limits, and hitting them is just unimaginably bad.

That's maybe why civilians condemn cowardice, while the combat veteran knows how close he or she came..
or may yet come.

So if it's not being unafraid, and if it's not how you act, what's the deal? How can we somehow elevate the experience, place it in a transcendental context?

Through mercy. Mercy shown to those who broke under the lash, and mercy reserved for the knowledge of our own limits.

After all, Jesus was merciful to his proud, violent, and terrified rock, Peter.

Thank you all for being here, and continuing to comment. I do read your kind remarks, but replying on this smartphone takes more energy than I have available right now.

Sniper's Hide (Five Minute Friday)

The overwatch position from which a scout-sniper practices his trade is called a 'hide', and that's the keyword for today's Five Minute Friday, hosted by Kate Motaung (www.katemotaung.com).

GO

The job is not glamorous, not when your hide's in a ditch that, like most ditches in this part of the world, is partially filled with stuff you'd rather not think about. But if your cover - local vegetation stuck into a hessian smock, and liberally dosed with dirt - is good, you're likely to be left alone. The locals don't like ditches either.

Hard to avoid thinking about what's there, though, because you're lying in it. But eventually you learn to switch off your nose. Yes, really, but you hope your inoculation record's complete.

And you watch, and record, and wait, because the biggest part of the job is reconnaissance.

I learned a lot in places like that. It's helping me now.

Sometimes you have to wait in places you'd rather not be, with an alert and receptive spirit.

You have to be in the discomfort of the moment, and you have to be there without resentment. Not because there's a big payoff coming, but because that I where you're placed.

Mental escape is tempting, but wrong. It's a form of disloyalty.

You wait, and in that waiting you give honour to your place, and to He who placed you there.

STOP