The voyage of life in Daydreaming on the Porch

As I approach retirement, I find myself looking back on the past more and more often, thinking of my friends, jobs and careers with increasing emotion, even pathos. There is something quite poignant in this final stage of life.

At work more frequently than I want to, but most often when I am sitting out on the porch in my favorite rocking chair, I find myself reviewing my life. And this often revolves around periods of 20 years — the epochs in my life, so to speak.

Recent memories are not the strongest ones, that’s for sure. But during the past 20 years, I find that I have been trying to consolidate, make sense of, and interpret my memories. This has been the settling down period of life. Single, no family of my own, but settled in a job and career that has itself just about reached the 20-year mark. I had my own apartment, which I dearly loved, for 15 years until 2011 when I moved into my mother’s house to take care of her because dementia, a cruel and remorseless disease, had robbed her of her independence. I am now on call and up at all hours of the night changing adult underwear, helping her use the portable commode, getting her water and reassuring her that things are alright, even if I am not so certain they are. I reassure myself: all her vitals were good that day.

But there have been some very unsettling developments of late. The other night I noticed that personality changes at night are getting more noticeable. I’m sometimes speechless at brief bursts of mild profanity as these are such a departure from her normal sweet and gentle personna and demeanor. By morning she has no memory of her unpredictable outbursts. Also, any changes in her routines make her upset and she gets fearful and angry.

I work at my job during the day thanks to caregivers who stay with her, and I am able to relax, more or less, after work until about 9:30 when the last caregiver leaves. I then take on the “night shift.” Going on even a three-day weekend trip out of town is almost unthinkable. My whole life outside work revolves around her care and comfort, taking her vitals, giving her insulin, refilling prescriptions, calling the doctors when necessary (rarely, fortunately), keeping up her house, doing bills, seeing to tax matters and insurance, preparing meals.

So the last 20 years have largely been dominated by some level of care or assistance to my mother since her mid 70s when she was afflicted with the full onset of diabetes. I never imagined this would have happened to her. She is now 91.

The last five years have involved very intensive caregiving, and have required a high degree of vigilance, patience and persistence. How many times have I said to myself, “I can’t take much more of this?” And then I’d have unbearable thoughts or visions of her languishing in a nursing home or other facility. Mom is always grateful for all I do and aware of what I do, most of the time. She knows who I am. This is in contrast to what some adult children who are caregivers have to suffer through: parents who curse and berate them, don’t recognize them, and have undergone drastic personality changes for the worse. Thankfully, I do not have to deal with that and hopefully never will.

Twenty years ago in 1995 I was settling into my apartment and contemplating life in Charleston with a new job and career and with a degree of independence that seems almost incomprehensible now. Gradually and slowly over the years since then, all that changed and I now feel almost as isolated as I did in my 30s when I bounced around from one job to another and spent a good part of that decade in graduate school or teaching. What social life I have is with my co-workers and friends at work. But when I think about it, this is the way it’s always been. When I wasn’t changing jobs or in graduate school, I was traveling around the country, solo, of course. I have almost always done everything by myself — travel, eating out, movies (rarely), relaxing by the ocean, nature outings and walks, day trips. I’ve had an inordinate amount of time to think about life and the events and people in my past. Some might think too much time. One thing the solitary life has allowed me has been a very deep and satisfying awareness of, and sensitivity to, Nature and a capacity to peer more deeply into the “ordinary” aspects of life. The commonplace is not so ordinary or usual to me. This is revealed in my continuing passion for photography. I take my camera with me frequently, and there is hardly a week when I don’t have many pictures of share on Flickr. Also, the circumstances of my life limit me now to a small geographic area along the coast of South Carolina and inland for about 40 miles. That is my ocean and world and the extent to which I am able to circumnavigate it most of the time.

The previous 20 years of my life from age 22 to 42 were what I think of as my formative years, as opposed to childhood and adolescence. The decade when I was in my 20s I consider the “golden” decade, a period of time when life literally and figuratively opened up for me after a rather lonely childhood and adolescence, particularly my teenage years. I spent a lot of time back then reading, collecting stamps, mowing lawns in the summer and enjoying, for a brief couple of years, hanging out with two friends of my younger brother (two years behind me in high school). I had no friends my age. In contrast, my 20s appear now like some time-lapse film in which a flower quickly emerges and flourishes from a stem or bud.

By my early and mid 30s, I was really struggling to find my place in the world. I was drifting rather perilously. In my 20s I had the closest friends I would ever get to know. I had a relationship whose intensity and significance I was not even fully cognizant of until it collapsed. I had three different careers that blossomed and ended in that period of ten years. By my late 20s I had been to the bottom of the pit but found my way back out in a miraculous Spring of rebirth and recovery. Memories from that time are the most potent and long-lasting of all my memories. I was filled with the most profound religious and spiritual insights I had ever known. In fact, before that time I had been quite cut off from religion and spirituality. I lived my life as if it really didn’t matter. During those three years of awakening, I experienced the happiest and most fulfilling years of my life. The “golden years” from 22-27 were also very happy years, but it was a different sort of happiness and fulfillment.

The first 20 years of my life were the actual and literal formative years of childhood and adolescence and the early adult years of college. I find myself now at 64 thinking more often about those years, too, and I have many memory prompts to help me: actual paperback books I read back in the 1960s in high school; folders of school English papers and copies of graded Algebra and geometry tests (why I still have those is a mystery to me); and awards, certificates and report cards from grade school. Also, and crucially important, I have a black ledger book which became a handwritten journal or diary that I kept in college from age 19 to 22. That is one of the most priceless and revealing pieces of memorabilia or personal history from my past. Thank goodness I safeguarded it over the decades since. When I dip into it and read entries, the experience is always by turns enlightening, sad, depressing, engrossing and unfathomable, and yet endlessly fascinating. It’s like going back and opening a time capsule. I feel like I’m almost literally back in my youth when I read that journal. I kept a similar handwritten journal from 1979-1983 when I was teaching English and history, another of my brief careers. That journal is essentially an account of my spiritual journey and progress during several very special and contented years. It contains observations from that time when I was a teacher, and also reflections on my reading, devotions and faith journey. There has been nothing comparable since. I experienced the rare gift of inner peace. Now, looking back, it was indeed the critical stage of my pilgrimage. I am no longer that person, and yet paradoxically, I am that same person only older, wiser, more complex with the passage of years and people. How can this be? I think I feel, or perhaps want to feel, like the man in this Thomas Cole painting from his Voyage of Life series titled, “Old Age.”:

Finally, during most of the last third of my life I have kept an online journal, first my own home page and then for many years, a journal at Open Diary and now here at Prosebox and Easy Diary. All those online entries over a span of 17 years were, and are, the most sustained writing I have ever done, and tell my life story more completely than anything else I could have written. What I have not revealed in all that writing is as revealing as what I have chosen to write about. The continuing result is what I am posting today, writing about how at the beginning of the last stage of life, I look back to the past and my memories to teach me how I have lived and, more importantly, how in the future I might want to live.

Last updated August 21, 2015