Читать книгу WHEN DARKNESS REIGNS: - Wanda Covington - Страница 3

One destiny in life that all will face at some point in time is grief associated with a loss through death. Grief comes to all, perhaps in different forms and in varying degrees but still and yet, it comes. Loss is a very real experience as we travel through this life. Some people seem to be much better prepared to handle these experiences while others become desperately lost and therefore tend to seek a variety of sources to alleviate the anguish that consumes them as a result. Many of these reactions are very real and common human responses in this broken world that we live in today. One keynote to bring forth at the forefront of this writing is to remember this truth; we too will one day experience death and leave this place we call home that exists in the sphere identified as the world. Death tends to be a topic that many people choose to avoid until they are absolutely forced to face it either due to their own pending mortality or that of someone they love. It certainly isn’t what most people think of as a pleasant subject to purposely fill their thoughts with on any given day. Assuredly, I acknowledge that the pain that comes with the mental and emotional suffering when death makes its way toward you or the life of a loved one, can be excruciating, terrifying and quite debilitating. My expertise on this matter is simply this; to have loved and lost. My experiences through these losses lead me to the writing of this book with a profound hope that you may share in discovering the source of the hope, strength, and peace that enabled me to endure and persevere through my loss and grief so that you too may attain the same. I speak confidently in saying that the greatest hope to lead you through grueling grief and dark

circumstances in life is readily available to you if only you will seek it. Many desperately want it but don’t know how or where to begin to find it. My single goal in this writing is to show you how I discovered hope and to be a guide for your discovery of hope in times when darkness reigns.

On average, most people probably never give much thought to actively seeking hope, peace, strength, and comfort as they move along their daily activities in life. After all, our days are generally made up of accomplishing tasks, meeting goals and deadlines, providing for our daily needs, and adding in some recreation when time allows. People tend to live under the perception that self-sufficiency will sustain them, and, on the surface, it appears so. Then the day arrives when an evil adversary enters your life through one phone call. The adversary known as a roaring lion who delivers fear, anxiety, apprehension, and even terror, enters your life through the voice of another person who has called to inform you that a loved one has been taken to the hospital for an unknown medical issue and the tentative test results bear a terrifying diagnosis. Perhaps this adversarial destroyer has held you captive for an ongoing period of time, crippling you almost daily as you watch a loved one deteriorate before your very eyes. It could be that you’ve been informed by a loved one that they have discovered that they are getting ready to enter a battle for their life against the intruder who came to them unexpectedly and has now forced them to completely reassess their entire life and existence. What if possibly, a person you love dearly has a sudden onset medical event and survives but makes you realize that the destroyer had such a tight clutch on them that they nearly left you forever. Any one of these dark circumstances and many others like them delivered by the great adversary could cripple a person and take them to a pit of despair. My journey to guide you to the way of hope will begin here since it exemplifies the best starting point to reveal how brokenness lead me to wholeness. In the nearly three years prior to this writing, all four of these dark destroyers came into my life in close proximity in time, forcing me to deal with an overwhelmingly difficult amount of challenges, both internally and externally. The roaring adversary was confident he had won. I am sure he was actively planning his victory celebration in honor of my defeat. If there were no hope, this would be a very short writing, however, if you are willing to proceed forward, you will discover that hope is real, it is lifesaving, and it is readily available to you.

For you to have a more complete understanding of the challenges that befell me during those bleak three years, I must give you a brief background of who I was as a person prior to that. For much of my adult life, I served as a law enforcement officer and was approaching the completion of my 25th year of service in January of 2017. That type of career carries its own weights and burdens in and of itself. I managed through those years to move forward in a mindset of self-sufficiency; thinking that I was in control of my life, career, and those things and people connected to it. I had lost my father several years prior and it was my first real experience with loss except for a few friends and a beloved dog. Looking back on my life, those experiences were probably in keeping with the normal progression of time and events in the life of an average person. After the loss of my father, my mother lived alone in the home they shared for nearly 60 years. She was becoming elderly and health issues were increasingly presenting themselves. In some of the year 2015 and the majority of 2016, I found myself in the beginning stages of, at that time, part-time caregiver to my mother mainly due to some health issues that she had developed, as well as, some early signs of dementia. I was still working a full-time job that required some shift work, a lot of long strenuous hours and a tremendous amount of mental exhaustion from dealing with death and self-imposed human destruction so prevalent in our society today as I was a criminal investigator who also supervised that division in the agency that I was employed by. I was already overwhelmed with a great deal of responsibility that encompassed having control over the fate of other people’s lives; a responsibility that I did not take lightly. Consequently, I gave very little attention to my overall health and wellbeing. Having said that, in August of 2016 I learned that my blood sugar test results were abnormal, and I was classified as pre-diabetic mainly due to poor eating habits, lack of exercise, carrying around a little excess weight, and stress. All these shortcomings, I can now look back on and definitively say were directly attributed to the lifestyle of a law enforcement officer in general. But at the time, I moved forward in the way that most people do, within the context of the life that I had defined for myself. I didn’t know at the time that I was heading straight for the biggest challenges I would yet face in my life; furthermore, they were the most difficult and painful, and yet ultimately the most rewarding experiences I could have imagined.

Moving into 2016, I had noticed that my mother was having some memory issues, and at first, it really didn’t seem significant. She maintained her ability to perform routine daily functions such as cooking, doing her own laundry, grocery shopping, driving and caring for her home. Then some things started to become problematic such as forgetting to pay a bill or not being able to accurately maintain her bank accounts which I later learned to be classic signs of early dementia. Then I noticed small observations such as her forgetting to turn off the stove after making a cup of coffee. I wondered how this could be happening to my mother, a woman I had always seen as a strong, vibrant, and independent person. I was beginning to realize that her living alone was going to present some challenges and extra responsibilities would need to be fulfilled for her to maintain her independence lifestyle. Within the same recent years, she’d had a triple bypass heart surgery and several other vascular surgeries on her neck and legs. She had also turned into a full-blown diabetic. Her specialists were in a city approximately a half hour from her home and some of her follow-up visits were an hour away, so she required someone to take her to those visits because she wasn’t comfortable driving in traffic especially in unfamiliar areas. In fact, in time, her ability to drive became a safety issue so it reached a point she didn’t drive at all anymore. I knew that her health conditions weren’t going to improve much and in fact, some were going to rapidly decline in time. Already being saddled with an immense amount of pressures and burdens from my career which I had spent a lifetime proudly building, the reality was that the gravity of her impending needs was beginning to overwhelm me. I began to wonder how in the world I would ever be able to accomplish all of the things that would be required of me to keep my mother safe and comfortable in her own home and care for her medical needs and maintain my full-time position in my career. I spend a great deal of my allotted vacation time taking my mother to doctor’s visits and other such appointments necessary for her wellbeing such as x-rays and testing of various sorts. Mind you, I had to coordinate all of her appointments around my work schedule that included at times unexpectedly being called-out in the middle of the night, scheduled court appearances outside of normal working hours, and a number of other unforeseen occurrences that all came at the expense of the nature of the job. During this timeframe, my mother was inpatient in hospitals approximately 7 or 8 times for various reasons, with one stay lasting up to 41 days. As her dementia became more prevalent, it was necessary to be with her in the hospital most of the time so that sound decisions could be made on her behalf thereby ensuring that she could receive the best care possible. This too required my taking off work to be there. Well, after much soul searching and wrestling with myself and the situation, I finally realized I could not change the fact that she had needs which had to be fulfilled. I also realized that I would have to let go of the career that I had spent a lifetime building in order to be able to give my mother the loving care and attention that she so rightly deserved. You see, I loved my mother very dearly, as I suspect most people probably feel towards a parent. I knew that I would only have one chance to get this right and that this would be the last season of her life and I did not want to miss it. So, on December 31^stof 2016, I officially retired from law enforcement at full retirement, with 25 years of service at age 51. Little did I know, I was getting ready to discover some hard truths about myself and many other things in life.

Now that I’ve presented you with an overview of the circumstances that I faced going into the phase of caregiving for my mother, I recognize that many people in life are facing the exact same circumstances concerning caring for an elderly family member. In fact, according to a publication entitled Caregiving in the U.S. 2015, “an estimated 43.5 million adults in the United States had provided unpaid care to an adult or child in the prior 12 months.” It further stated “the majority of caregivers are female (60%) and they are 49 years old, on average.” They go on to say “ a large majority of caregivers provide care for a relative (85%), with 49% caring for a parent or parent-in-law” and “on average, they have been in their role for 4 years.” Also, it is noted “on average, caregivers spend 24.4 hours a week providing care to their loved one” (The National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and the AARP Public Policy Institute, June 2015, Caregiving in the U.S. 2015 – Executive Summary, pp. 9-13). So, what does all that mean for you and for me? It illustrates to me that caregiving requires a lot of work, it is time consuming, and we are not alone in these responsibilities. Somehow there is something comforting about knowing you are not alone. Frankly, I never had the need to research the magnitude of this issue before I was confronted by it, as with many things in life, this is often the case. It didn’t necessarily ease the immediate pressures, frustrations, and at times, feelings of desperation, but it did help open my eyes to the thought that if so many others before me had assumed that responsibility and survived, then so could I. You see, each of us are destined to travel a specific path laid out for our lives and whether we learn to embrace it or rail against it can determine how successfully we survive it. So, armed with a little knowledge and a lot of love, I began my walk as a caregiver with only the strength I found in my reservoir filled with self-sufficiency. Time and trials would soon show me that my strength alone was not enough, nor would it ever be enough to help me provide for my mother’s needs. You see, my mentality up until that point, was coming from the perspective of a long-time law enforcement officer, which says, I can handle anything and everything with little help from anyone. Flawed at best, but nonetheless, the truth as I saw it at the time. We all bring into any given situation things that are ingrained into our thinking and preconceived notions about how things should or shouldn’t be, and so it was with me also. I began to formulate clear and concise strategies to assist me with the functions that needed to be performed thereby giving me a logical and systematic method of organization. Well, in the beginning and through various phases of her care, these strategies were quite helpful, and I plan to include them in this writing so that you may, if you choose, utilize them as well. However, the silent adversary was roaming and biding his time waiting to strike again.

I began the process of adjusting to my new status of being retired and trying to deal with the separation issues that were associated with such changes like the complete disruption of familiar daily routines, a now uncertain definition of self-identification, an unknown sense of belongingness to the larger world structure and a multitude of other emotions that would take a great deal of time to sort through. I later learned these things to be quite normal, though it did not feel so at the time. I never quite felt that I could master one area of my life before another set of challenges was cast upon me quickly and without warning; after all, that is the adversary’s strategy. In July of 2017, after having new blood sugar testing, I discovered that I had become a full Type 2 diabetic. So, in August of that year, I decided that I had to make some serious and substantial changes in my life if I was going to ever bring my medical issues under control. I began researching diabetes and how foods affect the body. I made a commitment to begin eating better and decided that since all research was telling me to change eating in conjunction with exercise, I also began to walk a minimum of 30 minutes every other day. I kept a food journal and meticulously logged all foods and beverages I consumed each day to keep up with my nutritional intake and I also logged my physical activities to keep me on track. I had no idea if any of this would work, but I knew that I was predisposed to diabetes since my mother had it and I was seeing in her the person I would become medically if I didn’t begin to take this issue seriously.

I suppose up to this point, most of what I was experiencing was merely unfamiliar and even uncomfortable in many ways, but none of it prepared me for what was to come next. During all these new discoveries with myself and with Mom, the second of the four major life events during that three-year span struck our family. Having discovered some physical abnormalities, my sister-in-law sought a medical explanation and it was discovered that she was possibly facing a diagnosis of cancer. Not having quite gained a grasp on the ever-changing circumstances with my mother and the internal struggles I was still dealing with having left my career and facing diabetes, this new discovery felt extremely surreal and I didn’t know how to mentally process it. Up until that point in our family, no one had ever faced a potentially life-threatening illness of such magnitude. I found myself searching my mind for anything that seemed rational to explain these findings. I wanted so desperately to offer a solution to make everything normal again because, after all, remember, that’s what a law enforcement officer does – find solutions; only I wasn’t one anymore and there were no solutions within my control. I was left with a little deeper sense of emptiness and mounting frustration from lack of control. Everything familiar to me seemed to be in a downward spiral and I didn’t know how to level it out. Having received the news, my mother always being the ever-present voice of reason, was the one who lovingly gave encouragement and reassurance that everything would be alright. She was always a pillar of strength to everyone no matter their need. More testing was needed, and time seemed to crawl in anticipation of the final diagnosis and what would follow beyond that. During this waiting period, my mother’s dementia was increasing ever so subtly. She just kept repeating that maybe the tests were wrong and that my sister-in-law did not have cancer and in fact, said she knew that she did not have cancer. Perhaps my mother was simply in denial, which is an understandable response to such impending news concerning a loved one, but it constantly plagued her mind almost to a point of obsession. Watching her during this time, I became vividly aware that my care for her was going to entail so very much more than meeting physical needs; it was going to be vital to nurture her mental wellbeing also. I had begun keeping a journal to document my thoughts and events as a means of release and was increasingly growing more isolated from others, consciously or subconsciously, I’m truly not sure. I began doing whatever was within my means to keep a tight control over my life so that I could accomplish all that had been set before me. I became a person driven with a singleness of mind; to care for my mother and keep my life from dismantling. I often correlated my feelings at that time in my life as being trapped in a burning building with no avenue of escape. But I was soon to learn that I did have the means of escape and I could challenge that arrogant adversary who so deviously kept invaded my life.