Reading and Re-reading

Earlier this week when I was enjoying the wonderful opportunity to make some homemade bread, I took advantage of the opportunity to listen to some podcasts on my MP3 player as I prepared and kneaded the dough. This particular podcast was from a program that originally aired on NPR’s TALK OF THE NATION back in March, 2011.
Rachel Hadas, author, poet, and professor was the guest. The topic was her book, STRANGE RELATION: A MEMOIR OF MARRIAGE , DEMENTIA AND POETRY which tells of her life as the wife of a brilliant man, George, professor of music at Columbia University and composer, diagnosed at age 61 with dementia.

A few things struck me in this fascinating 30-minute interview

Rachel used her intimate, long-lived knowledge of George in evaluating and analyzing the changes in his life and his ongoing needs. Rachel , in other words, took on the role of advocate for her husband. This reflected her role while he still lived at home and when she found it necessary to place him in a long-term care ‘facility’ as she calls it.

Rachel provides the podcast audience with a wealth of resources from classical and modern literature which describe and/or apply to the reality of dementia in a person’s life. I found Rachel’s descriptions of these literary references quite illuminating. In particular I appreciatede her reflections on the poem, “Walls” by the Greek poet, Cavafy.

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind—
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

She continues: “Clearly those walls beg for a figurative reading and you could say they are depression or old age or illness, isolation. But this time around the walls looked like dementia.”

Rachel also commented early in the interview that anything worth reading is worth re-reading. She says we miss most of the content in the first reading. Hearing that, I immediately thought of the Constitutions of Religious Institutes of women and men. When we go back to those documents and read them with new eyes we see visionary and challenging calls to read the signs of the times.

One of the signs of the times is the current demographics of the membership of Congregations of men and women religious. What if we read our Constitutions and other significant documents in the context of our present signs of the times? How would that change how we view the ministry of service to our own elder members?

If you are interested in hearing this podcasst, go to the following URL:

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/10/134428733/Spouses-Dementia-Leaves-Poet-A-Strange-Relation