No Control

It’s Sunday morning and still raining in Raleigh. Several inches of water pool on the surface of our back yard, nothing compared to the towns east of us. Our soggy Sunday paper is full of images of rescues of the elderly in New Bern and Swansboro, Wilmington, James City and Riverbend. And the waters are still rising.

When will it stop?

It is so hard to sit with the situations we cannot control. I’ve found that these kinds of situations come more frequently as we age.

Not so long ago, I had the real privilege of sitting with a client on hospice who I’ve come to love. All the family members had traveled in to say their goodbyes. He had been aware of each during their visit, though also floating between this world and the next, talking with people long gone.

I was sitting at his bedside with the last grandchild when he said, “I love you. God bless. Good bye.” Then he had closed his eyes.

The grandson and I looked at each other and sat there silently beside him.

A few moments later, he opened his eyes, genuinely surprised to still be there, surprised that he could not will the moment of his demise.

In another recent case I helped with, we had to work hard to take the car keys from a patriarch who had never had to ask anyone for a ride. It was not done with malice. He was nearly blind. We assured him someone would be available to give him a ride when he needed one. We said we were not doing this without consideration. In fact, we were doing it after lots and lots of consideration. That didn't make it any easier.

Nor was the decision, in another family, to move a parent whose Alzheimers had progressed to beyond what their spouse could manage at home.

These are all situations which can kindle frustration, desperation, even at times, words or actions we’re not proud of. But how does one bare having no control?

The answer, from what I’ve witnessed, is very complicated, but also quite simple and very hard to do.

In a tug of war in which no one is ever likely to win, a therapist once told me, you just have to drop the rope. (In yoga, we would call it "surrender.")

A family member in Wilmington just texted me an image of the water from the creek by their house which is continuing to rise. No amount of sand bags can protect the white house with the red door which is theirs.

For that matter, no amount of sand bags can ultimately protect any of us. Believe it or not, there can actually be some relief in accepting that and then simply dealing as constructively as one can with the aftermath—which it appears we will be doing for a very long time here in North Carolina.