The long goodbyes so many of us are saying

Life, I have learnt, is full of goodbyes. Full of loss. Full of grief.

Not always the sudden, tragic grief we feel when someone we love dies, or when we receive shockingly sad news that changes our lives forever in the blink of an eye. More often, it is the grief that follows a period in which we come to terms with an impending loss. A huge change. A slow sadness.

Sometimes that loss is a goodbye. A goodbye to a life we once knew (and often took for granted); the loss of a relationship; a job; a chance of happiness; a road we hoped to travel. 

Increasingly - in my own life and in the lives of many of my clients - that loss is found in the long goodbye of watching someone fade away into dementia. As a friend said recently, it is like watching an old television set power down once it is switched off: the picture doesn’t disappear straight away, it flickers, it lingers and fades gradually from view. Slowly, reluctantly, losing colour; then light; then itself; before we are left with nothing but darkness and emptiness in front of us. 

That image off how the old TV responded to being switched off is how she described watching her own mother fade from view with dementia and it resonates so strongly with me and the countless experiences I hear from clients, friends and family as they deal with their own losses and their own long goodbyes to loved ones.

It is a mark of our increased longevity on this planet, and the long lives more people are leading, that more and more of us are dealt the cruel and at times brutal blow of supporting someone we love slip into memory loss, confusion, blankness and loss of themselves and their ability to fully function. The almost ubiquitousness of dementia feels like the price we are paying for advances in medical science and our ageing population - the downside of more of us hanging around into our seventies and beyond. Of course, the cruelty of losing someone to dementia is painful whether it happens long before they hit their seventies or later still. Loss is loss. Grief is grief. A long goodbye is painful whenever it begins and however long it takes.

It feels like every day I hear about someone else I am connected with and the arrival of dementia into some part of their life. It is all around us and yet we seem so often unprepared and at times unable to process what is happening; to move from denial through to acceptance with the speed that would make the goodbye bearable.

It is beyond tough, but as the great Viktor Frankl teaches us, we cannot choose what life throws at us but we can choose how we respond. He wrote that ‘life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose’. I am trying to find purpose and meaning in my own long goodbye as hard as it is: to find happiness in those simple moments of observed joy; of lucid conversations; of laughter; of shared passions (and shared complaints about team selections and bad football results!). 

So many of us are engaged now in saying a long goodbye to people we once knew and struggle now at times to recognise. It is the scourge of modern life. It is painful but it is possible to find purpose and meaning within it. That is what I keep telling myself and try to practice. To help, I draw (as I do so often) on The West Wing. In one moving conversation, Toby and the President quote from the Oscar-winning 1968 film, The Lion in the Winter, and the death that two characters face in the film: “You fool! As if it matters how a man falls down.” one of the condemned men said. To which his companion replies: “When the fall’s all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”

The manner of the fall - of the long goodbyes that so many of us are saying - matters a great deal.