WHAT WOULD THE DALAI LAMA DO?

            My mother is 93 years old. For the last 11 years she has lived about a mile from me in an assisted-living center.  For the first 8 or 9 years she did very well, taking the bus provided by the assisted-living center to stores and doctor appointments, enjoying books and crossword puzzles and outings with family.  

            And then things began to change.  Over the last couple of years there has been a rapid downhill slide. Her eyesight and hearing are failing.  She is in constant pain, and becomes frailer and more confused each day.  Outings exhaust her.  As her world becomes smaller and smaller, she has few pleasures left.  In fact, she states emphatically that she would like to slip away in her sleep.  

            So what does this have to do with the Dalai Lama?  Here’s where I need to talk about my role in my mother’s life.  During her early years in assisted living, I called her every day and took her out once a week.  Now, I visit her several times a week, write checks for her, do her laundry and shop for personal items.   She can no longer go to a doctor appointment without a family member to keep track of what is going on.  She calls me most days—sometimes more than once—to ask me what day it is or what time it is.  In short, I am now among her caregivers.   Fortunately for me, I am not alone.  One of my brothers handles her finances from the east coast.  My husband helps out with appointments and errands, and my ex husband (bless him) steps up again and again, visiting her and taking her to appointments.      

            So, with all this help, what’s my problem?  It's just this:  Help notwithstanding, on any given day I may feel tired or grumpy or sad or helpless or perhaps several or all of the above.   When I visit my mom, I am never sure who will greet me.  Will it be happy-to-see-me, grateful mom or will it be unhappy, critical, impossible-to-satisfy mom?  Of course, it is true that she has plenty of reasons to be unhappy.  See paragraph two above.  Still, I confess that there are days when my patience is thin, thinner than I would like.   There are days when I don’t want to stop on my way home from work after a long commute.   Days when I don’t want to navigate a confusing conversation in which I am likely to be blamed for the confusion.  And on days when I am happy to be there, when I feel honored and pleased to be able to tend to her, my heart breaks over her frailty and over her isolation.  It must be terrifying to wake up from a nap and not know what day it is or whether it is time to eat or to get ready for bed.   And then there is the sad fact that every person of her generation who ever mattered to her has passed.  And she wants to be with them.    

            So how can I be my best self with her?  What, I asked myself recently (changing the bumper sticker slightly) would the Dalai Lama do?  Or the Buddha?  Or, to return to the bumper sticker, Jesus?  Here’s the funny thing.  Although I have a pretty good idea what they would say about love and compassion and doing unto others and doing unto the least of these, I have no idea what they would do.  None of them, to my knowledge, ever played the role of caregiver to a sick or elderly family member.  We don’t know if Jesus had a wife or children, but we do know that by the time he began his ministry, he had no family in tow.  The Buddha left his wife and child when he went off to seek enlightenment, and, as far as I know, did not return to check on them.  The Dalai Lama was removed from his family as a child.  If he has put in stint as the caregiver of a family member, I have not heard about it.  

            So, although I revere these enlightened beings and try (with occasional and very modest success) to live by their teachings, they are of no help to me as role models in my current situation.  Where do I look?  I look to my friends.  I look to the friend who drives two hours every week to spend the night with her elderly parents, who organizes caregivers, and jumps in her car whenever one of her parents takes a turn for the worse.  I look to another friend who flies to Boston from her Oregon home every three months to spend two weeks relieving her sister, who tends to their mother the rest of the time.  I look to the friend who saw two children through bouts of mental illness.  I look to my sister-in-law’s sister to who gets up every morning and tends to her severely disabled son.  And I look to parents everywhere (including myself many years ago) who walk the floor with their crying infants when they would love to be sleeping in their beds.

            What do these people have in common?  They show up.  They show up when they are tired.  They show up when they are grumpy.   They show up with as much good cheer as they can, and when they run out of steam and cheer, they continue to show up.  They try not to lose it too often and to forgive themselves when they do.   They are my heroes.  Their strength gives me courage.

            So, I will go to hear the Dalai Lama when he comes to town next month, but I will look to the ordinary mortals who deal with mortgages and food shopping and finances and sick family members and crying children for my role models.  Thank you all – you know who you are - for being with me on the path, for laughing and crying with me during the hard times, and for helping me to find my way.