Word After Word

What should I do?

Sometimes “Do Nothing” is a good choice but it is a lot harder than it sounds.

I’m having such a hard time figuring out how to help my parents. They are both so severely ill, vulnerable, sinking fast. The situation with them was extraordinarily complicated before these treacherous new illnesses.

I think, most of the time, what I should do is: Nothing.  So much harder than Doing.

Before the new illnesses, it’s kind of like my parents default illnesses were dangerous under-trained stunt pilots, using really ancient airplanes that no one knows how to keep in proper working order anymore, or ever did. They took great mortal risks on a daily basis. I worried all the time. Now, the new illnesses have dissolved their silver wings, they’re out of gas. But they’re still up there, my parents, flashing around in the sky, careening at great speeds, falling, icing, yawing. It seems like someone should be doing something, namely me. “It’s like a two year old out in the road,” Dr. P. told me. “You do not think. You go! You need to go!”

But I’m not.  I’m doing nothing. It’s consuming.

What got me thinking about all this is my friend K. who has an Alzheimers mom still-living-alone in the sky, too, and when K and I talk about what she should do, I realize (you can always see it in other people’s stories better than your own) K. can’t really do anything. There’s nothing to do. Her mom will live alone. Her mom won’t do anything to help K worry less. Something will happen. Right now, I think K. should Do Nothing.  (So easy to tell someone to do this, really hard to practice at home alone.)

I remember the last time I ran out into the road to rescue my mom—I got hammered by a semi and she, like in a cartoon, sat in the middle of the traffic, grinning, fine, fine, fine.

It’s so hard to live this way, waiting for tragedy in the form of small metal planes aka parents to fall on our heads and knock us out.

Some parents organize themselves for the children. But I think that’s really rare, like happy holidays or perfect SATs or finding The One and getting a great book contract in the same year.

Instead of intercepting the story and acting all co-author salvific, galvanizing the situation with good deeds and guilt, maybe it’s better to walk alongside the story, as it unfolds, quietly.

I think of my student Tim, who is in crisis this week, and how good it would be if he could Do Nothing.

Oh my parents. My poor baby parents. I love them. It’s like loving a dream. They’re like a Chagall painting: fragile and falling and very very blue-creepy, beautiful, haunted. I’m not trying to watch a disaster like a traumatized bystander. I’m trying to be with them: close, realistic. Doing Nothing isn’t passive. It takes so much courage and patience and heart and vision.

It’s much easier to Do Something. (Call lawyers, neighbors, relatives, nursing homes, nurses, the dementia hotline, doctors, therapists, the moms themselves.) Busy-ness defers the pain, like a couple stiff Rob Roys.

Do Nothing feels like an abdication. But I think it might be pure love, a way of making more room for God.