Pondering Anxiety, Fear, Illness and the Bondage of Self

What do we call the voice that converses with us throughout the day? The one that tells us all is not well as we lie down to sleep or the one that wakes us before the iPod alarm goes off playing that same tired song by Dido, the one that nags: All is not well and All is not well!  

I had this conversation on my way to and from Whole Foods just now where I bought a curried turkey sandwich and low fat chips (I wouldn't suggest the latter):

--What's that pulling in your gut about?

--Nothing. Leave it alone. It goes away. 

--Not this time.  Is it caffeine? Lack of sleep? The truth? 

--Not now. Not now. 

--Fair enough but it will catch up with you sooner or later. 

This is the point I take out my new iPhone and play with it in the checkout line.  Still then, the question raised goes something like this: Technology creates and shushes my worry in those empty places and spaces where we wait in line alone.

Which brings me to this: is it fear or is it anxiety?  If I call it anxiety I am forced to consider the pathology of a diagnosis—something that rattles a therapist’s cage.  If I call it fear, I must consider the boldness of the word--like a bracing cup of espresso on a February morning on my way to the gero-psych unit at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA--the bold and not-so-beautiful reality of broken seniors, my elders falling apart just beyond my reach.

  

I heard fear through the phone last night as I listened to what one of my sister’s was saying.  She called to hear the words that would ground her before she moved back into the sector of someone else’s violent world.

So, this is the problem we must grapple with when we care for someone else.  Our problem—or at least my problem, perhaps, is when do I dive into the torrent and when do I stand back, tie the rope to a nearby tree and toss the other end toward the one drowning? 

What I know is that the problem exists in real time and place, not only in the abstract. It’s there, nestled up against the old brain that I share with every human and every mammal.  That old brain that doesn’t distinguish between actual and imagined danger.

So, do we stand back on the edge of a disease moving slowly but surely in my father's new brain?  A disease that wreaks havoc with its plaques and tangles? Do we stand back from those affected by the violence of it or jump in with both feet? 

All of it is accompanied by the fear that the precious moments that connect me to him may disappear as his memory fades.

Now that I sit quietly for the first time since morning, I ask the universe for one merciful memory.  I say:

Take me back to the night when we arrived home after driving through two hundred miles in darkness—coming back from Idaho or California, the heap of us kids lying in the ‘way-back’ of the Buena Vista station wagon where I pretend to stay asleep (how does one pretend to breathe the way a sleeping child breathes?).  Still, I’m sure he will be the gentle father that remembers I’m there, picks me up, gathers the sweaty blanket about me, swings my whole, trusting body out of the stuffy car into the night that smells of scrub oak and black walnut, through the doors and down the stairs—

And then the phone rings, again, and I go back to face the hot chants of the old brain that insists it’s too late for trust, too late for hope and reminds me that soon, if not already, he’ll not remember.