There's more to me than just me

Normal School, September 2008


Mirror Lake moved by light, September 2008

I had one of those "ah-ha" moments at a training session yesterday. An idea that moved me in a way I can't quite classify. Spiritual? Elemental? A way beyond "ways?"

Some people in the end stages of dementia (like Alzheimer's) become as infants. Long dormant reflexes return, revealed as the final layers of conscious life are peeled away. The bite reflex, the suck reflex, and the rooting reflex, referred to as primitive reflexes, can all come back and interfere with normal feeding and swallowing. They usually signal a person is near the end of his life.

Part of my job is to help caregivers determine if a client can eat without choking or aspirating (i.e., food entering the lungs where it can cause pneumonia). To check feeding and swallowing, I need to see how things are working inside the mouth, learn about the feeding environment, and generally use all my senses to feel, see, and listen to the swallow. A dementia patient might need some external cues to open her mouth if she doesn't respond to words. I check for the "primitive" reflexes. A touch to the cheek or lips may cause her to turn toward the touch as an infant turns to find her mother's breast. Place a finger in her mouth to check for food residue and she may end up sucking on your finger or reflexively biting it, like a newborn.

The thought of this fills me with wonder! We can become as newborns at death, all the layers of a life lived vanished like waves on the ocean. There are Buddhist teachings about this, obtuse and abstract riddles like "there is no birth, there is no death." When you follow a Buddhist path, you soon learn that isn't a nihilistic or existential concept. It's bigger. If we are not born and we do not die, then what is that big chunk of stuff in between bookend visits to the hospital? Nothing? The answer to that is why I'm on this path of going, going, going on beyond. There's more to me than just me. This tower of cards that defines me, my ego, my identity, my dreams, my accomplishments, will be gathered up and reshuffled when I finally die (or scattered to the wind). I'm not distressed by this thought, because there is something beyond my concept of me. Bigger. It's out of reach yet it surrounds everything I do. I feel it, like a warm breeze on my skin.

There's more to me than me.

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Photos: The building that holds my office and the lake just up the road. Both have history. The building used to be a Normal School, which I think is where teachers were trained, then it was a psychiatric long-term care facility, and now it is an office building. As a child, I would feed swans at the lake, across from my Grandma's house. My grandma used to work at Rosehaven. This town feels like home.

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