From time to time I log on to the US-based Buddhst website Tricycle (www.community.tricycle.com) and I've noticed that they've just started a forum on Zen teacher Susan Moon's new book "this is getting old: thoughts on ageing with humour and dignity". I haven't yet read the book but I'm intrigued by it because the blurb I've been reading on the internet suggests that it can be fun to get old. Nothing wrong with that of course - but what if you have dementia ? Where's the humour and dignity in that ? Maybe she deals with this in her book.
I wonder about the realtionship between the dharma and dementia because I've been caring for people in the advanced stages for over a decade now. In the early years, I had this romantic notion that those who have dementia, always having to live their life in the immediate moment, might experience it as spiritual in some way. But I no longer believe that. If you want to know what's it's like to be looking after someone with advancing dementia there is lots to be learned in Andrea Gillies wonderfully honest account in her recent book "Keeper". She and her family took on the care of her mother-in-law, Nancy, in an isolated house in the far north of Scotland. It's an inspiring and brutally honest account of what she and her family took on written with a lot of humour. Here's what she says about trying to spiritualise dementia:
"I sit with Nancy in front of the television and escape down my own wormhole, the one provided by the internet, laptop balanced on my lap. Somebody out in the odd, dislocated world of anonymous, typed-and-not-spoken conversation makes a light-hearted remark about the spiritual advantages of Alzheimer's. I don't bother shouting him down, as I know from previous experience that hundreds will be racing to do just that. Dementia carers are everywhere and fatuity isn't tolerated. The person (no gender ascribed, even) makes the point that living in the moment, only in the Now, is surely the target state of Buddhist teachings; that Nirvana is a state of perfection attained by being cut off from the past and future and their attendant states of wanting and anxiety. I can see what they're driving at and it's an interesting starting point for a discussion, but it's a debate that will never take place, as the self-appointed moral guardians that cluster at all such sites zoom in for the kill, hungry for the acclaim that will follow. Unfortunately, a state of bliss isn't the end point of Alzheimer's. Quite the reverse. The reality of having no past or future is that it isn't a state of perfection but of absence. The brain can't handle the absence and a chaotic, scrabbling sort of panic for order and meaning ensues. The Buddhist idea of living in the Now is, surely, something achieved through dealing with past and future, and not their abscence - of quencing their demands and silencing their voices. These are sleeping dogs, not missing dogs. In a state of Nirvana we'd have control over them, reconciled, having triumphed. An end to wanting and anxiety isn't ever going to be achieved through amnesia."
There's a lot of food for thought here I feel...
