Evolving Love

To love over time means to love differently—because everything evaporates.

Dew Evaporates
And all our world is dew...so dear,
So fresh, so fleeting

~ Zen poet Issa

Born Kobayashi Issa, in Shinano Province (present-day Nagano Prefecture), Japan on June 15, 1763, “Issa”, as he is better known, was born on a farm in this central portion of Japan. His studies led him to become a renowned Zen poet known best for his haiku poetry and from his journals. He is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan. Kobayashi Issa died from a stroke in 1828 at the tender age of 64–twenty years younger than my Dad is now. In case you were wondering, my Dad has written all of ZERO haiku in his entire life.

Still…

The haiku offered here is one of Issa’s most profound and poignant, especially when you learn that he wrote this right after the death of his daughter. I can both imagine and identify with the emotion, tears, and heartbreak he was feeling as he looked at the blank piece of paper then brushed the first lines of ink…

Dew Evaporates
And all our world is dew...so dear,
So fresh, so fleeting

You, those you love and those not so much; me, and those I love (and not so much too); my Dad soon enough; all…each and every precious one…

“…all our world is dew.”

In time, everything will evaporate—even the memory of it. Ours, theirs, yours, mine…Dad’s.

So may we Love, now. Before we forget. Before even it, too, evaporates.

Just make sure you change the way you love.

I love it when I learn something new. I love it more when I know that I’ve learned something new and so can appreciate it even more. Like, for instance, a new take on an old concept—especially a concept we might have taken for granted all too easily for all these many years.

Like love, for example.

No, like loving an elderly, 84 year old father with dementia, as the example.

Yeah, like that! Just that. Only that.

I thought I knew what I was doing when I was loving my Dad. And then he came to live with us.

Sometimes, after the new learning, when you take one step back and see the obviousness in the thing from so many other examples that were intimately in your life, you wonder at yourself if you were the only person on earth who didn’t see it or know it from the start. THAT’s humbling.

If I did have some inkling of it from my past, I see it now in a completely new and profound way. In other words, I have so much more to learn about life…and about love.

It’s no surprise that the mentors and teachers and elders in our lives that we’ve allowed in for the purpose of changing us, if we’ve chosen well, are bottomless wells of wisdom. This wisdom can come from the spoken or written word, from the beauty in the art or music they create, or simply, as we know from Dad’s lived examples, from the humble life they’ve lived.

I’ve referenced one of my mentors/teachers, Stephen Jenkinson, often in past posts. And for good reason. Jenkinson’s brain simply works differently than most, certainly mine. And his knowledge of the subject matter he’s most passionate about comes not from the things he’s read or even written (although some always does come those ways), but rather from his life experiences. And as any good teacher should say, “Forget what I tell you or show you, go out and LIVE it for yourself! Then, you’ll know!”

In my YouTube feed, Jenkinson gave a new take on a question posed to him that, as you will see, has a very deep, profound, and special meaning to me right now. To paraphrase the question put to Jenkinson:

“For someone who is confronted with or caring for a person who is dying, who is that intimately connected with a dying loved one, how can they hold that space, what can they do, how can they BE that is most supportive?”

So please pause for a moment and have a go at an answer. Imagine you are an Elder-in-Training (you are!) and someone you know, and maybe even love, approaches you, with full sincerity, because you mean that much to them such that they would ask you this very deep and necessary thing (oh may you be so lucky!); yes, imagine they asked YOU that exact question.

Or better, how would you advise ME, ‘cuz I’m living this with Dad right now. I’ve never done this before, nor was I Eldered in the ways of supporting a dying parent—each day presents something new either from Dad himself, from a circumstance, or even from somewhere deep inside of me. I think there are times when it feels I’m making it all up as I go; and then there are times when I’m trying to count on some form of generational memory that will surface in a flash of insight whose genesis was formed generations ago—since that was simply the way it was done in the “way back.”

Rhetorically, I’m asking YOU:

How do I do this? How am I to BE that is most supportive?

How do I best serve my dying Dad?

The best Love is to know Love is not a constant. Love must change.

Life demands that it does…

…but WE often don’t—change they way we love, that is. So we lose out on what a Love that changes can offer. Fortunately, I caught myself before it was too late—but I’m in uncharted territory still. You see, THIS is what I’ve learned anew—and am still learning. I’m not talking about doing things differently—of course I do things different for and with Dad now than I used to when I was 7, or 18, or 35. What must change is the subtle underlying current that is Love—not the doing of it; rather, the being of it.

I’ve never cared for a dying Dad before (the past six months notwithstanding). I’ve learned this though: I’ve had to love my Dad differently than the way he taught me to love him for the first 56 1/2 years of my life. I’ve had to BE LOVE differently.

I think I knew this, right? That you can’t love something or someone the same way forever. After all, it/they change, you change, so Love should change too, right. Gosh, that sounds so elementary. Yet, here I was, for so many years now, loving my “now” Dad, or trying to, in the same way when I loved him as a young son who looked up to this somewhat mysterious, solitary, quiet and hard-working farmer—my “back then” dad. But there had to be a realization at some point that that love had to be different—otherwise frustration would have only grown to a point where it might have become overwhelmingly suffocating. I cannot love a person who not all that long ago was a vital and strong farmer in the same manner I need to love a Dad with Lewy dementia who relies upon me 24/7. Had I kept my love constant since my beginning, I would not have allowed grief to usher in the compassion so necessary now to best serve my ailing father. Had that love stayed constant, had I continued to try to force him into the conceptual container of love I had created for him from the past, I would have risked a festering frustration, confusion, unmet expectation, and, scarily, resentment.

With Jenkinson’s words as an Eldering guide, I now know what it means to have to leave behind a love of a living Dad with an ample future (especially of the two of us together), to now loving a dying Dad with no real significant future ahead of him. That’s hard learning. But it’s necessary learning too.

Yet still, I stumble.

But I can assure you, the love now, the love between my Dad and me, is deeper, more enriching, and more meaningful—even as things become more challenging and emotional. In fact, Dad, right now, this retired farmer with Lewy dementia who needs me to toilet and shower and dress him every single day, is Eldering ME on the depths of what a love can be between a father and son. His daily living is the teaching; his vulnerability is his compassionate offering. My task, as given from my Dad, is to make my love pliant, adaptable, nuanced, and deep. And abundant. The BEING of it all.

I’m stupid if I don’t learn this from him. It’s the only way I’ll become a better human, and the son he needs now.

Yet still…

I stumble.

The seven minute clip below is worth watching in it’s entirety, in Jenkinson’s own voice with his unique, mesmerizing, and idiosyncratic style of language. Because, after all, chances are high you will find yourself loving a dying person at some point.

Well, that’s kind of true right now, right? I mean, just look around you. Dew evaporates.

And that love you have for them…well, it will need to change.

Postscript:

I know that some of these posts can center a lot on the heavy realities of dying and death—which is why I focused this post on Love. Underlying all the posts is a deep and abiding Love for my Dad. I trust that comes through. But this “death orientation” is intentional because I think this is precisely how Dad needs to be Eldering us—through his living of his dying for all of us to experience in one form or another. For to write about my Dad right now, it simply cannot be otherwise than to have death and dying beckoned forth to their full presence. Death is Dad’s constant and near companion now, no longer as hidden in the shadows of denial as we believe it to be for ourselves.

Because our culture has a hard time with all things death and dying—we’ve rightly been called a “death-phobic” culture—I wanted this theme to be a prevalent component of these posts. Along with, of course, anecdotes from Dad’s life so that more of who he was can be known to others.

By talking/writing/reading a lot about this “heavy” topic, the underlying intention is that we can begin to break down some of those self-imposed barriers to the Universal Truth that is death—not by becoming “de-sensitized” to it, but rather “more sensitized.” Embracing the awkwardness, the heaviness, and the dreadful anxiety about death now so that when it becomes our time, there is a remembering of how things could be, at a time unlike any other we will ever experience, when only it matters the most—especially to those who love us. Dying wiser is not just about easing our own suffering as we die, it is perhaps more about those who follow us, those who love us and will watch us die, so that when it becomes THEIR turn, they, too, will remember and live their own deaths better for having seen how we lived ours.

Our deaths, then, just like we want for our lives, will have had great meaning.

Next week’s post will center on grace but the next three or so posts following will be leaning more heavily into death in wise and meaningful ways from sources I trust you will come to value, and from unique perspectives I have faith you will hold sacrosanct. If you haven’t responded with a comment either to these posts’ threads or to me personally, please, I invite you to do so. I would absolutely LOVE to learn from you how your views of living, dying, and death have been impacted by my Dad’s example—as written by one of his sons.

Don’t you wish, at times, you could be inside the mind of another? If only for a brief moment of time? I do. And were I given that chance, I know I’d understand better and that my heart, god willing, would break open further.

To love is to open your heart to grief. Each day another opportunity to both grieve and celebrate the fleeting nature of all existence—like Issa’s morning dew. I love my Dad, even as I have had to learn to love him differently. And, he will die soon. And then, even then, the love I have for him will change.

Because it will need to.

A gathering of morning dew outside Club Med Lenseigne—Lake Stevens campus.

T plus 201 days…and counting. All the 200 days prior have evaporated into the air in which they were created—and with them, so many of the memories I thought might endure. The only day that matters now is this one. The only memory that matters is the one we’re about to create…together.

May it be created in Love and in Joy. And may it endure.

Until it too evaporates.

❤️ ❤️ ❤️