The Closing of Doors

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, "Don't demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well." Epictetus was lame, and had probably spent his early years in slavery. He understood that our control over external events is limited, and advocated the practice of control over our internal reactions to what befalls us.

My parents live in a nursing home. They moved in almost three years ago, both of them admitted for rehab. My mother had a severe left-side stroke seven and a half years back, and just before entering the nursing home had a fall that cracked ribs and punctured a lung. Somehow, after this injury, she lost the ability to swallow. Her rehab consisted of treatment, administered by a speech therapist, involving external electrical stimulation of muscles involved in swallowing. It worked.

My father's rehab was about learning to walk again after a fall that severed the large tendon holding the quadriceps to the knee. He had surgery followed by another surgery after a re-injury of the same type. 

After the rehabs the two of them were strongly encouraged by the staff of the home, my brother, and myself to stay there. My father strongly resisted this proposed arrangement. He was sure he could continue to care for my mother as he'd done for the almost four years since her stroke. 

But he'd lost most of his sight to macular degeneration. He'd lost the ability to get around without a walker, and wasn't going to get all of his knee function restored. It took him a long time to realize and admit this, just as, after the stroke, it took him a long time to realize and admit that my mother would not walk or talk again. 

Like most of us, my father doesn't like it when a door closes and there's no going back to the more familiar and more spacious territory on the other side of the door. Some would say these junctures are deaths of a sort. To me, they're more like exiles--something was there, a place of comfort at least, and maybe even a place that was cherished. From your exile, you can recall the comfortable place so vividly you can see it, feel the weather there, smell the scents, and hear the sounds. But you can never go back.

I can't go back either. It's one of many things that make all these years of watching the slow, incremental decline of my parents painful. My father complains of some privilege he's lost--doing exercise in his room with one-pound weights being a recent one. He feels like he's being treated like a child, and there's some sense in the way he looks at it. The institutional environment with its need for hyper-vigilance in matters of safety isn't a world that makes sense to him. 

He brings some of his complaints to me--complaints that grow out of his inability to control little things in his own life. His power to make things happen has been slipping away for years, but he hasn't gotten used to the fact. It a hard fact for the human animal to assimilate. 

Unlike Epictetus, my father's orientation has always been toward fixing what's broken in the world around him. For most of his life this approach served him well, but somewhere along the line it became a habit he couldn't break or even moderate. In fact it would probably never occur to him that breaking it would serve any useful purpose. So now he rages against the dying of one light after another, and for the most part whatever he pushes against pushes back harder. 

The inner life is what's most genuinely ours. Of course it bears the stamp of influences too numerous to count, but our strongest influence is on what we are within, developed in the course of our interaction with the world outside. Whatever modicum of free will we have operates most convincingly within us. The only compensation for loss of freedom on the outside may be gains in the freedom we can develop for ourselves on the inside.

My father's disappointments seem connected to a sense that the world just isn't what it should be, and the people in it not what they should be. I've had similar disappointments myself. The line between acceptance and resignation is elusive, but it's there somewhere. Or so I hope.