Acupuncture for a Caregiver's Grief

Wowsers. As I mentioned previously (A Caregiver's Grief Process Stepping Up), I've started having acupuncture treatments to help me release the grief of losing Romeo to dementia. Wowsers. So far, so very good.

This is not the traditional Chinese acupuncture. It's Classical Five-Element Acupuncture. In my experience, one of the basic differences between the two is that in traditional Chinese acupuncture, the needles are left in for approximately 30 minutes or so, while in Classical Five-Element Acupuncture, the practitioner inserts the needles only very briefly, then removes them almost immediately. It seems as if the acupuncturist is inserting a needle into whatever energy blockages are in the body, puncturing them, and dispersing them, breaking them up. This is a good thing.

After my first treatment, I began crying before I left the acupuncture office. I cried on the 30-minute drive home, and I cried the rest of that day. These weren't wimpy tears rolling down my cheeks. These were huge drops of salty tears, coming from an unknown place deep within me. My cries were long, loud, and emotionally draining. My crying was not associated with anything specific about losing Romeo. These tears simply surrounded the situation itself. The tears were...well, who knows what they were? They simply were. And on this day, I let them come until they were gone. For now.

Yep, I've been crying frequently throughout this experience of Romeo's dementia. There are still more to come. Lots more. But at least now, with the help of acupuncture, they're no longer blocked. They're releasing.

Not a Caregiver's Bone In My Body

How did this happen? Me, who has never enjoyed taking care of anyone or anything, how did I get here? How did I become a caregiver? How did my husband, the love of my lifetimes, get dementia? We kicked and screamed all the way! How did we get here?

I just want to have fun. I just want to live in my beautiful home with my beautiful husband and drive my beautiful car around the beautiful area we live in. I just want to cook beautiful meals and create beautiful art and play beautiful music. I just want to wear beautiful clothes and take beautiful vacations and hang out with our beautiful family and friends.

I just want to have tea with my husband in any coffee shop we choose. I just want to wander the bookstores with him, whenever we choose. I just want to enjoy his intelligent conversation and his company, his conscious presence. I just want to go out for a meal with him wherever and whenever we want. How did this happen? What were we thinking? How did we get here?

A Caregiver's Grief Process Stepping Up

It's been building quietly for some time now. I release it periodically, when I feel it. But lately there has been a hugeness knocking at the door from the inside, a presence of stress, grief, sadness wanting to be let out. It's making a lot of noise. It's clawing at the inner door of my spirit like a female cat in heat, howling and screaming. And it's winning. It's coming out. My grief process is stepping up.

With losing Romeo to dementia, with losing his physical presence in our home, comes grief. I've been grieving since he was first diagnosed with dementia four years ago, and this grief process of mine comes in waves.

However, for the past month or so there's been more stress, grief, and sadness than I seem to be able to release. Or at least it appears that my frequent releases aren't able to keep up with the grief that keeps coming and coming. I certainly don't want to hold onto it, but it seems stuck, blocked.

So I followed the suggestion of a friend and am having acupuncture to help me through this process. After my first treatment, I started crying before I left the clinic. And I cried on the drive home (yep, I probably should not have driven, but I felt like I could cry all day). And I cried when the nice, handsome policeman pulled me over for speeding (I never speed -- it's been 27 years since I've received any sort of traffic violation!). And I cried when I realized that I must be getting really OLD since I couldn't talk my way out of the ticket. And when I got home, I cried all afternoon without stopping and went to bed crying. Gosh, it felt good.

Acupuncture is my new hero. I'll be going every week for a while. I've never cried so much in my life, and there's still more to come. There are still more energy blockages to burst, and there is still more stress and sadness to release. Gosh, it feels good.

Letting It Go and Letting It Be In Dementiaville

When Romeo lived at home with me, I helped him with whatever he needed help with, whether he asked for it or not. I anticipated what he might need help with and did it before he knew he needed it.

And yes, perhaps I even indulged Romeo. I gave him everything I could, and then some. I was his set of eyes, his ears, his memory, his arms, his legs, and his sense of touch, taste, and smell, his everything. I was an extension of him. And why not? I loved him like I've never loved another, and this was a way to show it.

What I didn't think of then is how I was absolutely spoiling Romeo rotten. Of course, to me it didn't feel like I was spoiling him. I simply put myself in his place and asked what I would have liked from my caregiver, and the answer that came up is what I did for Romeo.

Now that Romeo lives in a nursing home, there is no one-on-one care. This is a shock. To him, and to me as well. Romeo's every wish is not my command, and I can't make it anyone else's command. In Romeo's life at the nursing home, all of his needs are met, as they were met at home with me. But not nearly as quickly, not as immediately, not as urgently. And he feels it, as do I. He feels the frustration, the lack of control, the sadness of me not being there to give him what he wants.

Romeo has not done well in letting go of that, letting go of the one-on-one care he received when he lived at home with me. He hasn't let go of wanting what he wants, when he wants it. I too had a difficult time in letting go of the fact that Romeo's can't have his every desire when he wants it.

But it's a little easier for me to let go, to realize that he is frustrated, to let it be. I can't change it now, and I would not have changed it then. Loving Romeo, giving him his heart's desire, was my joy. It was my conscious choice. And now, we both have to let it go, simply let it be. And that, too, is a conscious choice.

Drumming In Dementiaville, Part Deux

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear.

-- Layne Redmond,

in When the Drummers Were Women:

a Spiritual History of Drumming

And so Romeo took an unexpected, forced hiatus from drumming after he fell at home and after his hospital stay and after the transfer to the nursing home. (See The Fall and What Happened After, or Dementia Unleashed and A Caregiver Alone At Home.)

That hiatus, however, was brief. In the morning of Romeo's fourth day at the nursing home, I wheeled him into the second floor lounge for a -- you guessed it -- for a drum circle. Among the scheduled activities for residents that day, in addition to bingo and a review of news headlines and an ice cream social, was a drum circle. And Romeo wanted to be there. He wanted to beat on a drum. He wanted to feel the beat of drums.

It would be an understatement to say that this drum circle, which is held twice a month, is a popular event. Every session Romeo and I have gone to (which is all of them so far) has been packed. On this particular day, like all the others, residents filled the lounge and spilled out into the hallway. There were drums and sticks and shakers enough to go around, and no one was afraid to use them, and use them well. Passersby paused, watched through the hall windows, and either lingered for a time or continued moving down the hall as the beat punctuated their every step and swing of their arms and hips.

And the residents themselves...well, it was no secret that they love it. Rhythm. My goodness, it's huge. Think about it. It's the cyclical pattern of creation, increase, power, dissolution, death, incubation, and creation again. Rhythm is the passage of time -- not clock time but rhythmic cycle time. Each person who ever lived on the earth felt rhythm every moment of their lives, as we do, in the pulse of our own heartbeats, in our blood, and in our own breath. The beat of the drums, rhythm, hits you in the guts. The beat of the drums, rhythm, is the deep, unconscious echo of the universe, of existence. The beat of the drums is what we are, who we are.

For many of the residents of nursing homes, in the last stages of their lives, their existence, whether they are conscious of it or not, is about reframing all they've learned. It's a time of re-youthanization, of finding big meaning in the small, about understanding each thread in their personal life weaving. It's about saying less and spending more time simply being. It's a time for breathing. And it's about timelessness. Rhythm was always there. Rhythm will remain after we're gone.

The beat of the drums -- do you sense it? Very faint and far away? The beat -- do you feel it? The rhythm -- can you feel it pulsing through every cell in your body? Can you? Can you feel it? The rhythm. Isn't it a cosmic miracle?