Column on Loss and dementia

Our congregation had a service for Pat Barnd this past week. She was a 30 year church secretary, a model of kindness and organization. That good mind slipped away as dementia overtook her. The same week, I wrote to a pastor around my age in Indiana who lost a son to cancer in his early twenties, and now she is in hospice care for cancer.

For the first time that I recall, I took aim at dementia in Pat’s service this week. Dementia pushes us to examine what we see as the nature of God, and what we claim as the nature of being human. In early stages, you feel yourself disintegrating.  It strikes me as a Buddhist disease in a way, as the element of the self breakdown in a merger with the elements of creation. It is a living death to the self and its relations. Some of us fear dementia more than death itself. This may be the only time we live out forgiveness fully as wrongs inflicted seem to disappear.

At some point they stop recognizing us, and then do not recognize themselves. Are we not more than our memories? Bereft of skills, do we not deserve dignity and respect? One way I handled my mother’s stroke-related dementia was to make an analogy to an infant. You take care of an infant but in the first few weeks you do not get much back as response. When Jesus said that we must be like children to enter the kingdom of God, could it mean, in part, that we at long last acknowledge our dependent state of being?  John Swinton writes that relationships shift and change, and as people with dementia tend to lose their relationships over time. He continues:  it is not capacities or human relationships we should be focusing on, but that being a person is a status that flows from being a human individual in the world.  In the end, our relationship with God gives us value. Hear Christine Bryden, a woman with presenile dementia, ‘I believe that I am much more than just my brain structure and function, which is declining daily. My creation in the divine image is as a soul capable of love, sacrifice and hope, not as a perfect human being, in mind or body. Try to relate to me in that way, seeing me as God sees me.’  In this view, I think therefore I am, is replaced with ‘We are because we are sustained in God’s memory.’

We may forget our loved ones; we may no longer recognize ourselves. God does not forget us. God’s expansive memory holds us together. God remembers us and holds us close. “God is immortal, and whatever becomes an element in the life of God is therefore imperishable.” God remembers in steadfast love (Ps. 25).  In process theology, not only does God experience our experience and include it within his own, but also in him there is no transience or loss, but  attained forever. Apart from God, time is perpetual perishing the achievements of the world are cumulative; our experience matters. Nothing worth saving is lost in the life of God.

It is difficult for me to speak of the god of power over creation when faced with dementia or the looming hurricane (at this writing) bound for Texas, where both of our daughters are. It is difficult for me to grasp how we can speak of god making discrete decisions for every occurrence on earth.  That may be a mistake, where we link the power of God to human conceptions of power over others.  Pat, my mother, and those suffering 'remain tightly held within the memories of God.'

(the pastor of whom I wrote die don Friday afternoon)