words
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Away With Words
Continued...
She doesn’t speak either. She doesn’t even smile. Over the last four years, her speech has deteriorated from missing words to garbled words, from a repeated eh-duh-duh to something less. Frontotemporal dementia is the diagnosis. With her narrowed speech has come narrow focus, narrow behavior and an unchanging facial expression. This past August she went to live in a nursing home.
My mother continues to communicate, though in ever more limited ways. She hugs her husband and children and mouths something that we take for I love you. In beautiful handwriting but cryptic words she hands out notes that say ‘Don’t to ride.’ ‘The church to the Saturday evening.’ When we manage to get her to church, she avidly follows the service and takes communion.
Doctors say Mom will live for a long time. She has a strong, healthy body. The only disease is in the frontal lobes of her brain. What can my mother Mary Jane do with her limited mind, limited speech and long life, I ask? If she can’t go through her mind, she can go through her heart is the pungent answer I receive, not from doctors but in the home of my spiritual mother, Mother Meera. This answer is for our entire family. We must all go through our hearts now.
It is Mother Meera who has taught me to value the heart’s silence. In the ten years that I have been visiting her in a small German village, I have heard her voice only a few times on the telephone. But conversation is not what I seek from Mother Meera. Silence and Light are her gifts. The touch of her fingers on my head and the gaze of her eyes into mine have taught me that silence leads to vastness not narrowness and to inner freedom despite outer limitation.
A while back, I introduced my uncommunicative mother Mary Jane to a photo of my silent Mother Meera. I added a quote from Mother’s book Answers: “You must be calm. Nothing must frighten or shake you. To be like that you have to turn your whole concentration towards God.” Mom read the words and ran her finger over Mother’s face. “Beautiful,” she said clearly. ~
