What is compassion, anyway? Is it mere forgiveness? Is it cushy, makes us feel good, the cause we donate to; the prayer in Sunday church that all sinners find their ways? Is this compassion?
Nope.
Compassion is not always easy. Mostly not. It’s often associated with very hard work, sometimes dangerous work. Doctors who work around | between | Without Borders are compassionate people in service to those who need them in situations that often put them at risk of death or injury. I suppose that is the key word, isn’t it? Service. People currently helping documented, legal immigrants often at risk to their own safety are compassionate people. I recall in a much earlier post I discussed love as being a verb that inhabits a way of being. Compassionate people understand what this means and they act on that love verb.
All of us are human, and as we mature we come to recognize this about our parents, whose lives are surely full of errors in judgment. My own mother did plenty wrong with me, but she also did plenty right. I know I’ve said before she deserved compassion as she journeyed through dementia, and my greatest heartache is that she did not receive all she deserved not just as my mother, but as a human being who was suffering. I could not be indifferent to her suffering, which is another mark of compassion: it walks without indifference to the suffering of others.
This is not about false compassion or the person who hovers endlessly seeking to control rather than serve. I often tell members of the dementia support group that one of the earliest, most important steps I took through compassion for my mother was to get out of the way. I had to stop needing her as a daughter, and this was a very painful understanding for me to have in the awareness that I could only best serve my mother if I stopped needing her as my mother. I had to let the Mother figure go. I was nevertheless her daughter, and everyone recognized me as such: “Oh, Marianne, look, your daughter’s here….” My mother, too, recognized me as such, never forgetting my name, and even on her deathbed, though she could no longer speak, in the last hours of her life she managed one wide, final smile in recognition of my presence. There was great love. Great loss. And this is the other thing about compassion. It often entails an action, an activity; ongoing engagement that breaks our hearts. But through our grief we continue to move in service to the one we are caring for. The harder it gets, the more we offer. This is the place where balance is always needed so that we don’t collapse, but my point is, learning compassion, being compassion, exercising the verb we call love as in to love takes commitment and energy, and it is too often not about anything that is easy.
As an active caregiver or partner in your loved one’s journey through dementia, I want you to know so many of us are out here who recognize your effort and understand how your compassion for your loved one has taken shape. Be good to yourself. As I wrote in my poem “Geese,” the sound of joy and sorrow falls on the same tremulous note. You hold hands with that note, those sounds on a regular basis and that leads me to another component that contributes to compassion: bravery. It seems it wouldn’t take bravery to be compassionate, but it took a lot of emotional courage on my part to leave my mother behind and embrace the woman in front of me who asked if my mother was still alive.
Never be too hard on yourself while you are doing the work of compassion as a caregiver. And whatever the work you do, moving through it with compassion, which also includes joy and enthusiasm, you demonstrate a loving nature as a human being. Those of us whose journeys with loved ones have ended recognize you are one among many who remain unseen. We hold you up in our hearts. For your compassion, we say, Thank you.