What I think I've learned in trying to
communicate with my father, is the importance of emotion.
Now, this is a dangerous subject
because I may fall into the trap of repeating, as a sort of advocate,
the claim that we undervalue emotion in “our”
culture.
That would be a true thing to say, but
it is too imprecise for my purposes.
So, I shall try to approach the subject
a bit differently. What makes a person a person? What makes our
human persons be what we are? And, how can a person who is largely
helpless still be a person?
A person—that means enough like you
and me that s/he deserves what we deserve, respect and help .
What I've seen with my father is that
his basic emotional ties are all in place. I think that diagnoses
get it all wrong when they fault him for messing with chronological
time, not knowing where he is, and so on. That's all merely the
book-keeping of the workplace. And the workplace is, mostly,
anti-democratic, mind-numbing, and soul-crushing. (The irony is that
my father loved his job, but was forced to retire in his mid-forties
after a bad car accident.)
If you are at all familiar with Milan
Kundera, there is a story where a man imagines the world of his
elderly mother—a world where a pear is enormous and a Russian tank
is small. I think K wanted to recognize that this elderly mother's
world is truthful, and I want to say something similar about my father's world.
My father's emotional connections are
rich and lively. That part of him is not dead. However, it takes a
sensitive audience to nourish that very real connection with reality.
And, a sterile hospital-atmosphere is precisely what kills that.
And, insofar as one is focused-- responsibly-- on helping him with
his very real needs, one runs the risk of neglecting that other, very
real part of him. I have seen him twice on Skype now, since his
return from the three-week isolation chamber called Rehabilitation.
He has lost skills he used to have. At night, he has difficulty
sleeping and experiences, once again, the fear he felt when he was
isolated. He had his share of solitary confinement thanks to the
ignorance of a system that was never designed to see him as a person.
I recently came across a study in a
nursing journal that recommends that care-givers sing along with
their patients. I did something like that with my father during the
time I was home. (2009-2012) By chance, I found old songs and movies
on Youtube that belonged to my parents' generation, and for me to see
the real pleasure it brought to them was a rare gift. It showed me
what is possible for them, members of the category
“frail elderly”. Their lives need not be filled with fear
and anxiety.
They can be glad to be alive. That is
really not too much to ask. And it has made me unforgiving of
anyone who wittingly or not takes away from them such a basic
components of human happiness, something which is not expensive and
is not by nature scarce---though our system
of social organization seems designed to make it so.
That kind of emotional connection takes
time, and is not suited to the time-management approach of
institutions.
What I think now, as I write you, is
the problem we face is that we don't understand the human mind, and
we view it through lenses tinted by our oppressive institutional
structures. We don't see the world through the lenses offered by
art, poetry, dance--those emotional worlds which nourish a part of us
that is flexible and open, sad and hopeful at the same time. Instead
we insist on framing ourselves through the closeted darkness of
profit and social hierarchy.
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