A Sisyphean Task

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!"
- Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard"

Eternal torment of the spotless mind is more like it. . .

I went to visit a parishioner today who is losing their mind to Alzheimer's. There has been some mild confusion over the last few years, but now we are descending into a fairly rapid decline, and for their own safety, they have moved to a locked unit in a care facility. Though not generally in the habit of wearing a collar (unless I am preaching, presiding, or visiting the ICU), I wore one on purpose today, hoping that even if P did not recognize me, they might at least make a connection to and draw some comfort from this symbol around my neck.

To my surprise, P did recognize me right away, never calling me by name, but definitely knowing my role and purpose. I was greeted with a hug and words of gratitude for stopping by, then invited to come in and sit down - all in the same pattern of welcome when I would visit P at home. So at first I thought maybe the decline wasn't as bad as I was expecting.

But then it became obvious fairly quickly that P can no longer track conversation for more than a few minutes at a time, and is roaming pretty freely through the whole scope of their memory - one minute they are in the present, the next minute they are "present" 50 years ago (still talking to me but talking about people or a situation deep in their past as if it's a present reality). Time and memory are collapsing in on each other, so that P is mixing up what experiences and conversations have been had with whom when, and what was actually said, resulting in P feeling very confused, frightened, sad, and alone.

Add to this the fact that fellow residents, whose minds are even more far gone and have no boundaries left whatsoever, barge into P's room without permission, rummage through their things, and try to abscond with them before the nursing staff become apprised of the situation and escort them out. Our conversation was interrupted by the same resident three different times in the hour I was there. After the third time P looked at me with despairing resignation in their eyes and sighed "It's like this all day long."

Such are the hard realities of this disease. Pastorally, it's a great challenge to find ways and words to comfort someone who can't stay with you very long and who is no longer processing the world and their experiences in a way that's coherent - even when you do stumble into something that speaks volumes of grace in the moment, it's truly only for a moment, and then another thought or memory comes flooding in, the attention shifts, and the giant boulder goes running back down the hill. By the time it hits the bottom, the gracious moment is gone, and you can do nothing more but put your shoulder back to the rock and stumble your way toward another peak, fully knowing that it, too, will be but a minor and temporary victory.

I was glad for this visit with P, though for the rest of the day I have been plagued by a kind of sober sadness that I haven't felt since my chaplaincy rotation, which I did at a nursing home in Minneapolis. I spent a lot of time with people in P's situation that summer, and happened to see the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at the $2 theater in Roseville the last week of the rotation. I found the movie particularly powerful after a summer spent among those living with varying degrees of memory loss, and what I found most poignantly true and comforting was the power of love to call us back from the abyss. I had seen such love at work in many of the residents, helping to ground them among the swirling and fading of their lives. But I had also seen others who, for whatever reasons, had become untethered and stepped completely over the edge into oblivion.

Here's praying that the love of their family, and the love of our Christian community, will hold and ground P for a while longer. . .