How Much Energy Do You Expend Judging Alzheimer's Disease?

Have you ever thought about how much energy you put into judging whether things in your life are good or bad, or right or wrong? We seem to spend a lot of energy judging both ourselves and others and then beating ourselves up over the conclusion, when either we or others don't measure up to our expectations.

I set out on a project which included observation of the number of times in a day that I judged something, either external to me or within myself. I was amazed at how many of my thoughts included judgement of some sort. When Jessie was alive,  I spent a lot of time judging the nature of Alzheimer's disease and that it was wrong and/or bad. I judged her behavior and I judged my responses to both her and the disease.

What would happen if we removed judgement from our life? What would it be like if we didn't judge anything as good or bad, right or wrong, rather just accepted "what is".  I've been playing around a little bit with this concept and I have to say I'm definitely more content and peaceful when I remove the judgement and live with what is. We spend a lot of time and energy torturing ourselves mentally with judgement and not only does this affect us, but also relationships with other people.

Spend some time today noticing how frequently you judge things and the nature of your judgements. It's quite ironic that as I'm sitting here, I am thinking about how I have hurt my lower back and how bad it is. I'm thinking about the things I had planned to do in the next few days and that I won't be able to do them. I'm spending a lot of time judging and am reminded that I can replace the judgement with "what is".  As soon as I reminded myself of this, I felt more peaceful.

There is a prayer in The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, that would serve us well to reflect upon: "Help us to love others just the way they are with no conditions. Help us to accept them the way they are without judgement, because if we judge them, we find them guilty, we blame them, and we have the need to punish them." I would also add that we could replace the "them" with the 'I" and extend the prayer to ourselves as well as others!

What Are We Meant To Learn From Alzheimer's Disease?

Through gratefulness you attract grace. Gratefulness is the magnetic force that brings grace to you- Osho

Have you ever wondered why Alzheimer's disease is in your life? It really resonated with me when I heard someone ask "why me" and then flipped it around and asked "why not me?" When bad things happen to good people, I really believe it's because we are meant to learn something from it. Why is it that we only learn when things are tough? Maybe the the whole point of the struggles and challenges in our lives are so that we'll learn something from it!

That got me thinking about what I have learned from having Alzheimer's touch my life, first in my career and then in my family. I gave it some serious thought and came up with 10 things that Alzheimer's taught me. Learning these things wasn't an easy process as it isn't the most comfortable thing to look at yourself and acknowledge that there are some areas that require some work. This is my list:

1)  I wasn't as patient as I would have liked to be. I forgave myself for this and then began to learn to practice patience in my life.
2)  I had to constantly remind myself to not blame the person for the effects of the disease, but to blame the disease.  This enabled me to be more patient and compassionate towards the person while acknowledging the frustration with the disease and not the person.
3) I had to learn to let go of the things that I couldn't control and accept uncertainty. Thinking that I could actually control the disease just lead to frustration.
4) Learning to live in the moment was the greatest gift of all.  I'm grateful for a disease that continually reminds me that the moment is the only thing that we have. This lead me to learn to meditate which has resulted in more peace and calm in my life.
5) Connecting is possible and when it happens it's beautiful.
6) The soul is not the mind.  The soul exists even when the mind is affected by the disease.
7) Most things are more powerful than words, like animals, nature, music, touch, a smile and love.
8) Communities need to embrace all those who are suffering and do everything humanly possible to be compassionate and desire to alleviate the suffering.
9) Suffering arises from the mind. The more with think about our situation, the more we suffer.
10) The thoughts and feelings that we focus on grow so why not make them loving, accepting, kind, patient, non judgemental and forgiving.

What has your journey with Alzheimer's or dementia taught you?

When Saying "Goodbye" Is Beautiful

Live deeply, live totally, live wholly, so when death comes and knocks at your door you are ready- Osho

I had been a nurse for many years and experienced some pretty remarkable things at the time of people's deaths. I worked in palliative and end of life care and was commonly amazed by experiences that would leave me questioning about what happens when a person transitions out of this world. What happens when a person dies? Does their spirit live on? I definitely don't know the answers to these age old questions, but I do know that what I've witnessed  has left me wondering.

When my mother-in-law Jessie died, I, as well as other family members were at her bedside. She was at the stage in her disease that she didn't know who we were  and had difficulty communicating. When we got the call late at night that this might be "it" we made our way to the care facility where she was living. This was not the first time that we got "the" call, however, and we wondered whether this was really it, or was this another false alarm. This roller coaster of near death and then coming back to life is a common phenomenon in the Alzheimer's world.

When we arrived, Jessie was unresponsive and resting peacefully. Her breathing had changed and she didn't respond to her name or touch. She seemed to be in that place that wasn't in this world, but wasn't yet transitioned out of this world. Being a palliative care nurse, I knew that this was likely the last few hours or days of her life. I was so grateful that she seemed comfortable and had a very peaceful look on her face. We just sat with her and took turns sitting on her bed and stroking her arm.

At one point early in the wee hours of the morning, my husband was sitting on the edge of the bed with  Jessie's hand resting on his. He looked to me and informed me that he was going to leave to go to the washroom. As he began to move his hand away to leave for a few moments, Jessie grabbed his arm and firmly held on. Nothing else changed in her except that communication that she didn't want him to leave. My husband looked at me with disbelief in his eyes and indicated to me that he was going to try this again and see if it happened again. When he repeated this, the same thing happened. Jessie, wasn't able to talk and appeared to be unresponsive, but she was aware! Jessie died a short time later with her family at her side.

I have nursed people who shared what happened during near death experiences and who came back from an unresponsive state. All of them told me that they were aware of what people were saying to them and everything that was going on around them. This is such a powerful thing to know as people sit vigil at the bedside of someone who is dying.  These same people also shared with me that they weren't afraid and that they were in a peaceful and loving place.

What experiences are you willing to share?

Can We Be Grateful For Alzheimer's Disease?

I know that sounds like a strange question.  Quite honestly I never thought about gratitude when I was in the middle of dealing with the day to day struggles of Alzheimer's disease. Now that I have some distance from the experience and started to become more grateful about things in general, I have come to appreciate the profound impact gratitude can have.

At the time that I was accompanying Jessie on her journey with Alzheimer's, I seemed to focus more on the challenges and what we as a family were losing. I think that is a normal reaction and one that is experienced by many. I have come, however, to understand the gift of gratitude and believe that if I had identified more with gratitude than lack, loss or difficulties, I may have had more joyful, peaceful moments.

The thing that I am most grateful for as a result of my experience with Alzheimer's disease is the realization that the more I live in the moment, the happier I am. The more we don't live in the moment with Alzheimer's disease the more we will struggle and suffer. Being grateful for the moments is the single most powerful thing that we can do to attract more special moments into our lives.

I just finished watching the movie, The Secret. I had read the book a number of years ago and decided to watch the movie. I found it incredibly powerful as it reminded me about the law of attraction and that what you focus on, is what you manifest more of in your life. If we focus on the negative about Alzheimer's disease, we'll attract more of it. If we focus on the things that we have to be grateful for we change our experience to a more positive one.

Gratitude is not only something you think about, but it's also something that you feel. When I first started to focus on being more grateful in my life, I focused on the thoughts but not the feelings. To truly practice gratitude you need to also feel it. I now spend time in the morning, night and periodically throughout the day thinking and feeling the gratitude. A good trigger for me is when I start to get into a negative thinking or feeling cycle. A few seconds of gratitude and it's amazing how different I can feel. Writing it down, amplifies it even further.  So if you haven't already, why not try a gratitude journal. If you do, you will no doubt be grateful for it!

Listen to what Brene Brown has to say about gratitude and joy.  What are you grateful for today?

The Many Blessings of Having Dementia!

Christine Bryden shares the blessings she has found through her experience with dementia. Thank you Christine, for sharing your heart and soul with us!! This is what Christine has to say:

I do indeed feel very blessed to have been shocked out of my previous life.  I was a busy 46-year-old divorced mother of three girls aged 10, 14 and 9, and had a successful and demanding career as science advisor to the Prime Minister of Australia.  My brain multi-tasked and was constantly stressed, juggling so many things at once.  I had great hopes for my future, of seeing my daughters married, cradling grandchildren, and furthering my career to become perhaps a Departmental Secretary or a Director of company boards.

But then came the shock of diagnosis in 1995, and the trauma of dealing with the despair and depression that followed.  It was like travelling through the valley of the shadow of death, but my church family stood alongside me, reassuring me of Christ’s presence during this dark time. 

I struggled to write my first book Who will I be when I die? as I went through this time of adjustment to a new and very different future.   I had time to contemplate God’s goodness and presence in my life, and could almost feel his arms around me, upholding me and comforting me.

After almost three years of this bleak time, when I drew close to God for reassurance, I felt able to claim some measure of healing – of my emotions and my spirit – despite still declining cognitively.  I felt more positive about my future, with no real basis for doing so.  Yet I was lonely, and wondered what God wanted for me.  After sharing with friends and my daughters, I finally went to an introductions agency, and met Paul.  He had a wonderful vision of how he was called to love me and stay beside me until my death.  I talk about our love story and this miraculous vision in my second book Dancing with dementia.

So by 1998 I had a wonderful caring person by my side.  We married in 1999, and I began my journey of advocacy in Australia and around the world with Paul as my enabler, my encourager and my cheer-leader.  Together we have been able to touch so many lives, and to give hope to so many people living with dementia, and their families.  It is indeed a calling, and I now feel confident that God brought us together in my time of need so that we could reach out and share with so many others.

God has blessed me richly by snatching me out of my busy life, allowing me a time of despair with a diagnosis of dementia, and then lifting me up through the loving support of Paul.  God has placed upon us both a sacred task of speaking out for all those who do not want to speak out, fear public speaking, or have lost the ability to speak.

I can joyfully say that there is hope in living a new life in the slow lane of dementia!

Watch Christine's video as she shares what you can do to help the person with dementia. 

Alzheimer's Beyond the Cure

There was an article in the Calgary Herald this week, Dealing with dementia: Experts warn the disease will ravage societies as baby boomer age.  The article describes that there is a wave of Alzheimer's disease and dementia that is set to hit our society and that we're not prepared for it. Words like epidemic and catastrophe are used to describe what we can expect and the impact it will have on our society. Further, Alzheimer's is a terminal disease with no cure and a progressive nature which ultimately results in death. While these facts and reality are important in order to get Alzheimer's disease on the radar as a priority for governments and health care agencies, we must balance that focus with how we approach the disease now.

When we understand that Alzheimer's disease is a terminal illness, we can apply palliative approaches that focus on quality of life and peaceful living for the time that is remaining. While we have people diligently looking for a cure, we need to put more effort into creating and supporting normal lives and living for people with dementia. A daughter in the article describes how they have learned to live more in the moment and appreciate the little things. I believe this is critical and the biggest gift that Alzheimer's has to offer us. Alzheimer's reminds us continually that all we have is the moment. And the better we are at living in the moment the more peaceful we'll be with alzheimer's disease and our lives in general.

I thought it was ironic that I have a coffee mug that reminds me daily to "Love the Moment." As I started down the path of trying to live more in the moment and appreciate the little things, I noticed that I hadn't even noticed the "Love the Moment" reminder. How sad is that? I don't think I'm alone in being so caught up in my thoughts that I can have my life going by without even experiencing it.

The good news is that through practice we can get better at noticing the moments that make up our lives. The more we notice the more peaceful and joyful we'll be and I think we could all use a little more of that! When we begin to notice that we're not in the moment, we are in the moment. Let Alzheimer's disease and dementia remind us the power of living in the moment!