I recently conducted a funeral for Enid;
it was, for me, the most difficult funeral that I have yet to lead and it left
me feeling dissatisfied; an itch was not scratched; it was incomplete. The
family had been the most disturbed and disturbing that I had ever encountered.
Nothing was manifestly untoward on the surface but the unspoken tidal currents
of great pain and rage were whirling beneath us. Enid's son did not attend the meeting at the family home and I tried on successive days to contact the son for I had nothing for a eulogy. He was out, he couldn’t talk and
then when I did speak to him he had nothing to give me; he was happy with the
plans we had in place. His son in law wrote a short eulogy which contained
nothing of the facts of her life just a couple of anecdotes. The first time I
heard it was in the ceremony itself. The first time I met the next of kin was
at the ceremony itself.
There was genuine emotion in some of the gathered crowd; women wept
openly; the men stone faced, red faced, unexpressive. The words I spoke were
gentle, pacifying and deep. I could use the word God and did. I chose to lower
the coffin at the committal despite not knowing what the son would have wanted;
I had to mark the end of her life and I had to assist the transition somehow.
The eulogy said nothing of her life; her ancestry, her roots, her parents, her
upbringing, her marriage, her motherhood, her widowhood… just a couple of
snapshot stories of funny times with her grandchildren. The service ended and
the family shouted and cajoled themselves into cars to go on for a meal
afterwards; a cursory thanks and handshake; a certain satisfaction that they
felt it had gone well.
The funeral director gave me the cheque and I held it in my hands. It
felt empty. I felt like I had showed up to a day job not a vocation; there was
a futility in the act; nothing had changed, something was unspoken.
Enid had died at age 89 with Alzheimer’s
disease. The ambivalence, distance, absence, repressed rage and unspoken
resentments that riddled the family; the patchy eulogy of selected stories; the
lack of engagement or closure in the token ceremony… this, it has become
apparent to me, a case study of a dementia death. As I talked through in
supervision how I had come away from the funeral ambivalent myself about the
work, feeling heavy, pained and dulled by the experience… I became conscious of
how this could help me write the book.
I happen to know that if we adopt the
belief that the soul leaves the body at death; the spiritual essence of that
individual returns to the collective for either reincarnation or ascension. If
we do look through that lens then from personal experience I can testify that
souls that enter into the “dementia contract” are destined to die while they are
still alive; to experience a death so gentle that few notice they have even
died and the soul lacks the momentum to leave the astral plane at all and sinks
heavily into the family field if not consciously released.
I wonder if the heaviness of the family field
is both a cause and effect of the "dementia contract". Maybe those with heaviness
in their ancestry find that they reach a point where they refuse to carry the
burdens further and begin to regress to a childlike state where they have no
responsibility and cannot be blamed for anything; where their needs are met by
others and they are cradled into death without fear or too much pain or
torment.
That is not to say that dementia is without
pain and torment but it seems that the extent to which the person and the
family are identified and attached to their personality roles is directly
proportional to the pain experienced by all involved as the personality and
identity associated with those roles is erased.
That is to say that someone is
very firmly “man, father, provider” or “matriarch, boss, mother” finds it
deeply distressing as their ability to play those roles becomes diminished
especially as those that love him or her try to continue to enact those roles
for which they no longer have the scripts.
This phase of dementia passes, of course,
as all things do. And there comes a time when the memories of the roles are
held entirely by the family and have been lost to the individual. At this point
they settle into a routine of reliving the core feelings that have been woven
into their muscle memory; for some this might be fear but for most there is a
contendedness in simplicity… a gentle word, touch, flower, bird song, sunlight…
brings about peace.
Enid’s story has reconnected me to why I
would write the book. For fear of being judged as wacky I wanted to steer clear
of the spirit clearance side of things to focus on whether we can work towards
a deeper understanding of the meaning and message of dementia; largely for
those that care for people with dementia; how can we find peace with the
process? I still intend on doing that but I also realize that with the
increasing levels of dementia in our ageing population if we don’t become
conscious of the psychic and energetic load in our collective field of spirits not
making a clean exit from this plane then we are sinking fast into a morbid
energetic quicksand. A collective inertia, forgetting, ambivalence and
resentment borne of, I believe, the shadow of the personality identified age
that we live in. As the generations born into war and rationing now age and die
the unspoken terrors of a war-torn childhood, loss of fathers, mothers who had
to father, unprocessed trauma, denial of comfort and rapid developments in
industry, food production and the pace of life... the development of psychology
and medicine, the decline of church and community… all compounding into a
cohort of souls incarnating for longer but living much more isolated lives.
So, I am in service of these souls and of humanity. The book contains case studies and testimonials… also meditations on 12 aspects of dementia such as communication, identity, memory, compassion… and it will contain a narrative and insights that the spirit clearance aspect of my work has given me. It continues to grow and change and evolve. Every thing is inspiration and every thing is information.
