the midpoint
Below you’ll find something I read from a stage in my small town at an open mic night that is one of my favorite things to experience here. The audience was gracious and I’m grateful. Two friends who have lost a parent in mid-life shared their writing about the same thing. Connection is rad.
My grandma died at age seventy-three of Alzheimer’s Disease. This July my mom repeated that history. She was also 73 when I kissed her forehead hundreds of times in her last days and hours. Both my grandma and my mom lived with losing their minds for about ten years before their bodies stopped. So in case you missed it, the strong women before me succumbed to a march to the end that started in their early sixties.
I know what this could mean for my future and what it means that being my mom’s primary caregiver through my 40’s could be looked at like a decade was erased from my life, but I don’t do math and even if I did, I’m here now, standing on a tiny town’s theater stage, reading some writing.
I’m here now.
I grew older, yes, fast. Time slipped away as quickly as my once over-achieving mother’s mind left her. It has been an aching season. It has depleted every last part of me,
Or, or wait. Every lost part of me. It has depleted every lost part of me. Ask any dementia caregiver if they’re concerned about all the things they once found baffling about life and they will tell you all of that is over. No more fretting over wrinkles or weeds. Less reacting, more responding. We have been burned to the ground, where it’s hard to do any navel gazing. And when our loved ones go, after going and going and going, the trippiest thing happens. Our souls seem to get the best parts of their souls, the truest and most loving and whole parts, and we keep it all, inside us, and that’s how no human is ever actually truly gone.
I feel incredibly sad and tired. I also feel invincible, or or, I know I’m actually vincible, which is a word I made up and the opposite of invincible and that’s a gift. It’s a gift to know so fully that I’m frail and time here is finite for us all, no matter when we were born. Knowing that so closely
will make you feel fully alive, if you let it.
When you’re broken open all spilled out
you see it all
everything
every spirit thing.
You say to yourself,
You can only take so much but it kept coming anyway
and
you took it and it took you
And it showed you
your worst parts
And then it showed you
how to forgive yourself
It said, BE FREE.
I couldn’t give enough to everyone that needed me. I’ve been caregiving in one way or another for my entire adult life. And then it got so intense; we were all at the end of ourselves. The things I once measured my worth by weren’t even in existence. A clean house, a healthy dinner. A good job. A good job could not even be done at all, in any way and that’s not shame talking, it’s just the truth. We were lost and wanting, all of us together.
When you walk a road holding the hand of death for a long time, you know there are no golden years and there certainly isn’t a midlife. It’s all relative, iffy, individual. We all have a different mid-point. We all have a different story. Upon another story. Upon another story, semi-colon, semi-colon, semi-colon…
You hear this, but now I really know it: You only have now, and now, and now…and that’s how neither memory and time can ever actually be stolen from us.
So I’m a midlife woman, according to the averages, the data, some math. And also according to the wrinkles. But because of all the “nows” I have lived, I am also invincible,
and I am finite.
Because of the ones I’ve lost, I am a good soul, and words run through my veins. I’m a truth serum. I know things, like the witches burned at the stake. And maybe, just maybe, these are my golden years.
