Dying Parents – By Maria Lazovic

April 19, 2018 Other

The sacredness and hidden mysteries of caring for an aging or dying parent as seen through the Spirals of Life

As an End-of-Life Doula I often think about the fact that for most of us a natural progression of the cycle of life is when our roles as children start to shift and eventually we come to be the caretakers of our parents.  This may begin by helping to clean their garage, driving on long distance trips, checking in more often, attending doctor appointments, organising medications or moving a parent into a retirement facility.  As these experiences accumulate, the underlying message is that we are asked to slowly begin to make the significant shift of confronting our parent’s mortality.

Often we are not aware the extent to which we have internalised our parents as an integral foundation of our psyche, our one constant relationship since birth – until we are faced with losing them.  Even as adults we may experience the person who is our parent as someone of large mythical proportions, even though they have assumed human dimensions as we’ve grown older. We may find ourselves consumed with fear or anticipatory grief at the idea of losing them, even if we have been living independently for many years.  In addition, it can bring up intense feelings ranging from deep love and gratitude to anger and confusion.

Our parent may move into a more vulnerable and dependent phase of life, perhaps just as we move into a phase of life where we feel more confident and competent.  Our parent enters a time when the thread of life weaves its tapestry spiralling inwards on itself – represented by a slower pace, time for contemplation and a feeling of living in a smaller world as aging and illness limits physical, and possibly mental abilities.  All the while we may be spiralling outwards into the world – represented by arising desires, much action and interaction in an ever expanding universe.

How mysterious it is that the bonds of family and love cause both parent and child to meet somewhere on this spiral, often heading in different directions but journeying together once again, intimately and within intensely emotional energies.  This strongly felt sense of physical intimacy and intensity is in some aspects not unlike those that arise at the birth of a child and nurturing during infancy.  In fact, in many Australian aboriginal languages, the name for elderly person is the same as for baby – it means something to the effect of “needs looking after / cannot look after self.”

Like a new mother or father, our noticings and sensitives may become more acute and alive.  The spiral of life creates an energetic vortex which brings forth the rich material of our often complicated relationship.  Paradoxically the connection to our parent may also be simplified at the same time.  Our attention may become hyper focused on their immediate needs as they age or are actively dying – allowing us to fully engage our heart in the sifting and sorting of all that surfaces in this process.

It may be a time to wonder who our parents were before we were born.  What sort of a child were they?  What sort of a relationship did they have with their parents?  What were their passions and interests?  How did having children change them?   These and many more questions come to the forefront as our time with our parent draws to an end.  The sharing and contemplation of these questions and answers all serve to nourish our souls as we come to realise that we are connected via many strands of intertwined, crisscrossed and merged cords of relationship.

Only close to her mother’s death did one women come to know that her grandmother committed suicide, and another women that her father descended from a family lineage that had monks in every generation for over 200 years.  All this information seemed critical to them upon finding it out and touched them in a profound way.

This time of life also often heralds a sort of rebirth of our own, a passage way to maturity and wisdom.  Space opens to explore our individual past, as well as our familial past. As our parents’ lives move toward conclusion, we are able to see more clearly their beliefs, values and challenges  – all embodied in what they chose to do with their time on earth.  This raises questions within us:  What have I done so far with my time? What to do with the life time I have left?  What will people remember about me?  Am I tending to my joy while I have the energy?

Perhaps one of the dis-eases of our present way of life is that we are often in a cultural mind-trance enchantment fuelled by media and consumerism, so that much of the time our thoughts are in the past or future.  Hence, our predominant currencies of connection are intellectualising, philosophising, and entertainment.  However, these frames of reference for understanding each other generally do not work well when connecting with a parent in an altered state of consciousness due to dementia, chronic illness or varying stages of dying.

At these times we are impelled to have an embodied present experience that demands the attention of our immediate sensations, thoughts and feelings.  Being with a parent who is dying or has been diagnosed with a life limiting condition, invites us into this space of ‘no time and all time’.  Very often whilst spending time with a parent close to death, our panoramic awareness may be engaged; we might receive a vision of some higher purpose, experience a deep sense of peace or a fleeting feeling that some gifts in life are revealed and understood only with the passing of time.  We may feel within our bodies the unravelling of deeper states of awareness that may continue for a long time after their death.

I envision the many trials and blessings of caring for a dying parent as part of the Spiral of Life, a seamless never-ending circling, spinning through time and space, forever expanding and contracting, with the spell-binding pulsing of life itself.

The living of life does change us on many levels, in subtle and not so subtle ways.  As an End-of-Life Doula I’m called to hold all these energies intuitively in compassionate awareness of the sacredness and mystery of life, allowing and encouraging each individual to be truly present in their own unique way and honouring all expressions and meanings of a lived life as valuable and cherished.

Author: Maria Lazovic

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