Another wind: Grief and the passing of Mari

Mari: In Memorium

 

Grief is always a painfully slow experience for me to work my way through—grief for my non-human family members as much as for the human ones. Now, 2 months after her death, I’ve finished the third of three digital mosaics of my cat, Mari. Each image has been increasingly complex, each exploring deeper, less articulate levels of my grief. With the completion of the last picture, my farewell feels complete. My grief is taking up residence in memory and only occasionally flashing into the now.

 

“Mari: Doorway Into Forever,” image CL Francisco (2022)

 

I finished this first mosaic  on the night of Mari’s death (“Mari: Doorway into Forever,” above). It was built on an earlier image I’d created more than 10 years ago (see below). In it I find myself grappling with the simple fact of her dying and moving beyond my reach.

 

“Doorway Into Forever,” image by CL Francisco (2012)

 

The second mosaic, “The Passing of Mari,” (below) I finished two weeks after her death. It reflects on Mari’s own awareness of her living and dying, and the natural place of both in the universe as we experience it.

“The Passing of Mari,” image CL Francisco

 

The third image, “Slipping Away,” (below) I finished yesterday. It reaches out toward yet further horizons, beginning with Mari’s intentional withdrawal from life and her brief return to my lap on the day of her death (using photos I took of her then). Beyond those beginnings, I tried to capture my sense that the flame I knew as Mari had already begun drifting away on another wind, into vast starscapes yet unknown to me.

“Slipping Away,” image CL Francisco

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Memoriam: Mari

 

Fifteen years was not enough . . .

image by CL Francisco

Mari was one of two kittens I adopted after I lost the cat who later became Yeshua’s Cat. Since the-cat-who-became-Yeshua’s-Cat was actually named Morgan, I needed a more appropriate name for a cat from the 1st C Levant. Mari (named after the ancient city) kindly loaned me her name, as well as her insights as I wrote. She is survived by her littermate, Bacchus.

 

 

 

 

Life in the Medical Wilderness

 

Image CL Francisco

Almost 2 years have passed since I last posted any personal updates—2 years of confusion, anger—and grace. Most amazingly, I do NOT have Lewy body dementia (or any other kind of dementia, for that matter): that’s the warm, beating heart of my news. I am infinitely grateful that I won’t be walking that road.

I do have a few thoughts about my experiences in the hands of physicians.

Here’s the background, in case you’re just tuning in. Early in 2019, I saw a respected neurologist, and assumed—foolishly—that he would be a man of principles, skilled in the performance of his art. Feeling anxious and off-balance from the sudden changes in my life, I reached out to him in trust. He, however, did little but look to his own divine omniscience (or personal lottery hopper, whatever) for inspiration before burdening me, a patient he’d barely met, with a capricious diagnosis of a rare and deadly disease. Following up on another doctor’s preliminary sleep study, he took perhaps 15 minutes to administer a quick mental status exam and a standard connect-the-dots psych test and then delivered his extempore diagnosis full-blown, like Athena from the brow of Zeus.

Image CL Francisco

I’m still angry, although I’m trying to let it go. After all, a physician who believes himself a god could easily have contracted his delusion by just breathing the air of our culture. As long as we hail our physicians as god-like purveyors of medical miracles, doctors who lack confidence or crave power will cloak themselves in our expectations like the great Oz in his curtains.

But I must accept some responsibility for my willingness to be misled. No one forced me to accept this man‘s diagnosis as a truth engraved on the foundation of the world. I’ve known for most of my adult life that a diagnosis is simply an opinion—as reliable,  or as dubious, as the person who offers it. That’s why we call a second diagnosis from a different doctor a “second opinion.” Still, in defense of my foolishness, I was anxious and off balance, and not thinking very objectively.

Image CL Francisco

And this is one of the huge ethical challenges of doctor-patient relationships: physicians encounter people at some of the most critical points in their lives, when they’re at their most vulnerable. We might even define patients as people experiencing diminished capacity brought on by poor health and the resultant anxiety. They come praying that a doctor will work miracles with his/her incomparable wisdom and skill. Patients are predisposed to be gullible: easy prey, in fact . . . except that doctors aren’t supposed to be predators (and most aren’t). Going to a doctor should never be a case of caveat emptor—“let the buyer beware.”

Image CL Francisco

So I’m back where I started. Angry. If I were a litigious person, I’d have sued him; however, I’m not, and I didn’t. I can only say what many others have said before me: in a more humane world, doctors would be required to experience—at least in some virtual sense—the conditions they would treat before being loosed on a world of suffering patients. That might go a long way toward eliminating a physician’s god complex.

Grace . . .

Grace intervened in late 2020, in the person of a wise and caring neurologist I happened upon during a phone conference she had with my husband. He mentioned my diagnosis in passing, and she asked to speak with me. By the time we hung up, I had an appointment to see her the next week. Two weeks after that, following a huge battery of blood and tissue tests, she confirmed her initial diagnosis of small fiber neuropathy (SFN) and started my treatment.

SFN is a complex syndrome with a staggering array of possible symptoms. I find the diagram below helpful in making sense of it:

 

There is no cure for small fiber neuropathy, but it is treatable, especially if caught early. Its progression can be slowed, and some losses may be recouped, although not completely. In my case, I’d already had two years of acute symptoms without any treatment before receiving an accurate diagnosis. Fortunately, I’ve responded well (if slowly) to therapy, particularly in areas of cognitive loss. I may never write another book, but I’ve recovered much of my vocabulary, my brain fog has lessened, and I’m remembering more of what I read. I can write letters and short essays (with the constant support of a thesaurus), and on a good day I can even edit existing manuscripts.

So, to all of you who have sent me messages of love and encouragement, I thank you! I may not have replied, but I’ve been warmed by your concern. I still don’t anticipate having much presence online, since I find writing of any kind exhausting. This post, for example, took three full days to compose, not counting getting it up online. I try to choose where my energy will be best spent. But I no longer perceive my life as a tragedy in process; I’m just aging, as every living creature does.

Image CL Francisco

I sometimes imagine these last few years as an expression of my physical uniqueness. Just as each of us has different fingerprints, and a distinct mosaic of genetic patterning, so every body slows down and wears out in ways that reflect a person’s particular life experiences and physical being. Our paths home will always take us by surprise, because no two are ever the same.

 

 

A note in closing: my 15-year-old grey tabby cat Mari, whose name I borrowed for the Yeshua’s Cats books, is dying of advanced renal disease. (The cat who inspired Yeshua’s Cat was actually named Morgan—an unlikely name for an ancient Levantine cat! So I used the name I’d given to one of the two kittens I’d adopted after Morgan’s death.)

Image: SDean@sdean.net
Image CL Francisco

Mari and I are exploring the shadowy vales of aging and illness together. We’ve become unexpectedly close as her health has deteriorated. Sometimes I’m not sure which one of us is the woman and which the cat. My husband says that Mari has been my sea anchor for most of her fifteen years, and that she’ll take pieces of me with her when she goes. I’m sure she will, but she’ll also leave pieces of herself behind. Neither of us will be the same.

Image CL Francisco

 

 

Afterthoughts

What follows is an unpublished post from June, 2020, written 1 ½ years after I was erroneously diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, and 3 months before I began treatment for small fiber neuropathy. It was intended to be the 4th in a series of posts on Lewy body dementia, but it was shuffled aside in the excitement of a possibly new diagnosis  . . .

Robin Hobb’s Memory Stone and Progressive Dementia

 

“I feel like a tree being ruthlessly pruned into a stump,” June 30, 2020

 

 

I wrote these words earlier today, as I was updating a symptom diary that I’ve been keeping for over a year now, so that I can remember how I’ve changed, and when. It took me a long time to understand and articulate that feeling, partly because I am diminished, and my awareness is narrowing. I feel life less keenly every day. I forget to care—about people and things I love. I drift, and draw in. My horizons shrink. My spirit vision darkens.

Image by CL Francisco

In an earlier post I mentioned that I forget every new book I read within a few months (books I read many years ago I still remember clearly). So when I find good books, I can enjoy them over and over again! This past Christmas my son gave me three new books: the Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb’s epic fantasy. I didn’t really like the first book when I started it, but since it was my son’s gift, and chosen with care, I didn’t set it aside. I’m not sure when I got hooked: maybe it was when the wolf Nighteyes entered the story. I know I was captivated by then. I bought the trilogies that continued the tale as I approached the end of each of the others. Nine thick books. And tonight I finished all nine for the third time.

Robin Hobb’s Trilogies with Fitz and the Fool

Hobb’s books haven’t been just entertainment. For me, the Farseer series (including The Tawny Man and Fitz and the Fool trilogies) is that rare thing, a story that flickers with hidden meaning, troubling and fascinating me with something just out of reach. I believe that the only way to understand a story like that it is to journey to its heart—and to mine. I’ve always done this by reading a book again and again, until a key eventually emerged to unlock the mystery. I’m not sure if forgetting the details between readings has helped or hindered me with these books, but when I closed the ninth book tonight, I finally understood.

Image CL Francisco

Hobb creates a fantasy world where some humans are gifted with an extraordinary sense she calls Skill. At the end of their lives, a very few choose to journey to a distant quarry and carve a dragon or other beast from the near-sentient stone there called Memory Stone. As they carve the stone, they release all their memories, and eventually their physical bodies, into the carved stone, hoping to bring it to a kind of life and achieve for themselves a limited immortality: their memories never really die.

Image CL Francisco

 

Image CL Francisco

The most difficult part of the dragon-carving is the carvers’ long and arduous process of yielding up the memories that make them who they are, in hopes that they have accumulated enough depth of memory to bring the stone to life. But once these carvers have given up a memory, they no longer have access to it. As their lives are poured out, they become vague and distant. They lose the love they feel for friends and family, recalling only dimly the fact of its earlier existence. They drift away from life, and from all but the current of Skill that draws them on.

I’m sure you see the parallels by now—not exact, but intriguing. I don’t know if Hobb intended to mythologize progressive dementia (or cognitive loss), but I believe she has, at least for me. What makes her telling so unexpectedly personal is her description of the effort her carvers make to invest their ever-dwindling strength and capacity into the creation of something that encompasses who they are . . . that embodies their lives’ essence.

image CL Francisco

Her images shine a light on my own days, making sense of what I have been doing in darkness and unknowing. For I also feel a compelling need to complete expressions of myself: a couple of unfinished books, paintings for my grandson’s walls, pen and ink portraits of my family, a Flickr photo site. I don’t do them as memorials, or to have my name remembered. I’ve always preferred to remain invisible, anonymous, like a cat hidden beneath the shadowy eaves of a forest. Instead, I am pouring my life into a spiritual nexus that I sense as myself, and the effort I expend contributes to its solidity.

Image CL Francisco

 

 

It’s so hard to put this into words!

 

 

British folk in times past sometimes spoke of retiring from the world in their old age to “make their souls.” That phrase feels oddly appropriate here. I am struggling to yield who I am into the will of the One, whose Being flows like a river through all that is. I am clarifying for myself who and what I am while confronting my own dissolution. I may grow vague and distant, unresponsive and hollowed out, as the life I’ve known seeps away. But by willingly releasing what I know as myself into the Creator’s vessel, I rest on the Deep of Being. I make my soul.

Image CL Francisco

 

 

 

 

“Blood on Holy Ground” now live on Amazon!

Buy it now on Amazon!

(Kindle format only)

the long-awaited

new Miranda Lamden mystery-thriller

Blood on Holy Ground!

 

Read the reviews!

“Blood on Holy Ground is an exciting contrast between belief systems, peoples, and forces of both good and evil, making for an engrossing story that’s hard to put down.”

Midwest Book Review, Diane Donovan, Editor and Senior Reviewer

“BLOOD ON HOLY GROUND is a beautifully-written mystery novel that combines a gripping and suspenseful story with thought-provoking and heartfelt spirituality.”

IndieReader: 4 stars

“C.L. Francisco is a modern writer in the tradition of Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis. Her ecumenical view of spiritual experience permeates this magical novel, expressing a love of the natural world and a reverence for religious folklore and fable.”

Self Publishing Review 4 ½ stars

 

Summary of Blood on Holy Ground

Blood on Holy Ground  follows Miranda to the re-purposed convent of Monte di Angeles, where she plans a quiet summer’s research into an old Native American legend. Instead, almost before she can uncrate her cats, the killings begin, and she finds herself caught up in murder, stalked by the killer, and haunted by prescient dreams. Tennessee hills blessed with a deep and almost conscious peace are overwhelmed by one atrocity after another, as the killer strikes at the land as well as the people.

Miranda, a professor of religion at a small Appalachian college, is an expert on paranormal phenomena, and a woman with rare spiritual gifts. Free of classwork for the summer, she abandons her significant other, artist Jack Crispen, and sets out for the convent-turned-retreat-center at the invitation of an old friend, who settles her into a forest hermitage near the tiny Conicoke Indian reservation. Miranda knows that unless she can persuade the Conicoke Grandmothers to trust her enough to share their traditions, her research will founder, and the heart of the legend will never open to her, since her only other sources are a few heavily-edited church accounts.

When Jack arrives for a visit, the two of them stumble onto the first murder victim, and the killer’s bitter monologues join the mystery narrative. As time passes, Miranda and Jack seem doomed to find more and more evidence of the killer’s crimes, goading the murderer into a paranoid conviction that Miranda is out to destroy him. Abandoning his other targets, he stalks her with obsessive fury. When the Conicoke Grandmothers draw Miranda into their circle, hoping that their combined seeing may show them a way to stop the violence, Miranda is immersed in a flood of visions both from spirits of the land and the killer’s victims.

But the murderer finds himself ensnared by his own evil when his assault on Miranda miscarries, leaving him to prowl the forest wounded and delusional, but lethal as a cornered viper. His toxic obsessions create a vortex of rage and evil that nearly destroys them all in its final combustion. Only the Grandmothers can guide Miranda and Jack along pathways that offer any hope of escape from the firestorm the killer unleashes.

Buy it now!

 

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How Yeshua’s Cat Began

Lately I’ve been clearing out the clutter on my computer’s hard drive (my Mac is getting on in years and  complaining about all the extra weight it’s carrying), and I came across this short essay I wrote in 2015. As far as I can tell, I never posted it anywhere. So for those of you who follow Yeshua’s Cats, here is another reflection on Mari’s beginnings . . .

Morgan, the cat from the wild woods

I remember the year I started writing The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat. I was working for a tiny non-profit whose prospects had just been obliterated by a catastrophic wildfire. The young cat who inspired the character of Yeshua’s cat had died as a consequence of the fire. My mother died a month after that. For months I spent my days climbing the burnt-out canyon slopes, measuring the severity of the burn in soil and trees, photographing the devastation, and assessing pockets of recovery.

After the Wildfire

In our battle against the land-owner’s determination to bring in salvage loggers (a battle we won), I dug tiny holes into the bark of every tree on our 2000 acres that still showed signs of life. The trees with healthy cambium layers I marked with green circles, exempting them from the loggers’ harvest–and, in the end, aggravating the loggers enough to cause them to back off, complaining that the profits weren’t worth their time without the living trees.

Trees with a chance of life

Even with our few hard-won victories, the stress took its toll on everyone. And no matter how hard we worked to support the land’s recovery, a non-profit foundation that relied on land-based workshops couldn’t survive on acreage that insurance companies saw as a treacherous ruin. We were forced to leave within the year.

Moving

On Easter Sunday of that last year, almost nine months after the fire, I went out walking in the blackened forest—only a few days after the kind of heavy rain that can be almost as devastating to a burned landscape as the original fire. I first visited a favorite Ponderosa pine that the fire had seared into a gleaming skeleton. Strange how the beauty of a tree endures after death; it merely changes.

But what I remember most clearly from that Easter walk was an unexpected discovery in an eroded gully cutting down the canyon slope. Its chalky soil abraded away by torrents of ash and water, a now-vertical arroyo wall had been transformed into art. Like a sudden ripple of joy in a sullen stream of melancholy music, the graceful skeleton of a tiny prehistoric horse leapt out of the bank to canter at my side. I almost didn’t see her. Dead for thousands of years, and yet somehow alive again.

Prehistoric horse

In a time when death seemed heaped upon death, the small skeleton might have been just one more death—but instead it felt like a gift, bringing with it wonder and hope. As Mari likes to say, it was a paradox.

A Burning Hope, CL Francisco

Sometime in the next few days I wrote the words, “My name is Mari, a name given to me by the man they call Yeshua ben Yosef.”

Morgan, by CL Francisco

If you count my PhD dissertation—and I do—then Yeshua’s Cat was my fourth book. I just never bothered to publish the others. Maybe I will some day, or maybe I’ll just publish with a pseudonym. Common wisdom decrees that an author shouldn’t change genres.

Postscript:

I did try using a pseudonym, but eventually I took my own name back. The Yeshua’s Cats ‘series of five books is now complete. My dissertation is available online at https://www.academia.edu/37357137/. The first of my three mysteries (This Madness of the Heart) was published a couple of years ago, and the second (Blood on Holy Ground) has just been released on Kindle. The third and last (Red Cliffs of Fall) is in the reviewers’ hands and will be will be out as soon as I can manage it. So keep an eye out!

 

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A Confusion of Shadows

(like a cauldron of bats, or a coalition of cheetahs)

 

3rd in a series of posts about the author’s experience

of Lewy body dementia

 

As an author, I never wrote from outlines or carefully crafted plots. Each book remained in flux as I wrote, balanced lightly in my mind, open to shifts in a character’s development or new paths to far horizons. Yet I always knew where I was headed and what I wanted to say. Alas, no more. Even writing a journal entry tumbles me into the wayward crosscurrents of a fraying consciousness.

 

People sometimes speak of women’s organic logic (as opposed to the linear logic of men), using words like spiraling, intuitive, archetypal. But increasingly, as I write even small posts like this one, I find myself moving through dementia’s bizarre post-logical inscape, where all patterns fade.

My efforts remind me of a befuddled spider struggling with an uncooperative web. Battered and ancient, she lurches from side to side, mumbling to herself as she lays one unlikely strand upon another. Much of her webbing falls away, its intended pattern vanishing through the gaps in her thoughts . . . words floating free of their mooring. Strands cross and re-cross at impossible angles, presenting only confusion to the reader. Yet somewhere beneath the chaos, a compassionate hand takes hold of the tangle, plaiting it into a rudimentary whole, and a pattern flickers through the ragged web—a glimpse of meaning as welcome as sunlight in the midst of storm.

I invite you to consider my web with me.

 

We all know the story of the frog sitting in a pan of gradually warming water until he quietly boils into dinner. This may be an outworn cliché, yet it  confronts us with a real peril of our human nature. Changes that creep up slowly can ghost under our radar. Only rarely do we perceive them as threats. When changes come slowly (they don’t even have to be subtle), or when the people perceiving them are unfocused and distracted, a shifting “normal” can erode into runaway catastrophe . . . Have politicians always been so venal? Has hate always been such a conspicuous part of American life? Didn’t New York winters used to be bitter cold? I can’t remember–is this the way home? Did I think to turn off the stove?

Lethargy has that kind of lethal potential for me.

Sometimes I wonder how I might’ve felt if my doctors hadn’t been familiar with LBD’s symptoms when I first had the sleep study. Would I have shrugged and dismissed my strange new life as normal aging? Would ennui have taken root in the mind fog? Putting a name on it does nothing to slow the disease, but at least it shows me what I’m facing. I possess a piece of data, a bit of knowledge, a light focused on the sly and slippery changes.

 

 

 

So what shall I do with myself as I confront this murkier-than-usual descent into the great mystery?

 

 

Dylan Thomas’ famous line, “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” is one option that everyone mentions sooner or later, as if such rage were a noble thing and a useful option.

But if you look at his whole poem, you’ll see that Thomas is talking about regret—regret for things his father didn’t do, for life unlived, and the rage he should feel. Yet a whisper intrudes on the poet’s advice: “Is this so different from a child’s rage at being carried off to bed too soon?”

 

So, should I rage? Or refuse regrets? I think I’ll pass on both. I can’t agree with the No regrets meme; too often it leads to complacency. I do have regrets, mostly for times when my spite made the world an uglier place. Those regrets are important to me. Without regret, I would never have confronted my unkindness, never turned away, and in some small way, Creation would be diminished. But wallowing in regret over foolish mistakes or pleasures denied corrodes the soul and makes a bitter tale for darkening days.

No, I prefer to hold in my tattering mind a passage from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. I can still remember how it rang like a bell when I first read it in high school:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you.”

 

So I learn what I can, even now. Not facts, or political scandals, or even devotional thoughts: facts and concepts soon disappear in the mist. Mostly I learn with my hands and vision—spiritual and physical—because  memory is strongest there. I still love to take photographs, although I fall asleep trying to process them. Last fall I foraged for woodland bounty to make gift wreaths. During the winter I experimented with sketching family portraits. Over the last few months I’ve been working on a series of paintings for my 2-year-old grandson’s room. The transformation from digital mock-up to painted canvas should begin any day now. Five years ago I never expected to pick up a paintbrush again.

 

I was an author, and I am no longer. I was once an artist, and now I may be again. I am a mother, a grandmother, a sister,  a wife, and a servant of cats. I was a daughter, and sometimes I remember to be an aunt. And, of course, there are things that never change: I detest hot humid weather and love the cold grace of winter trees; I have a feline heart, except for a well-hidden malamute shadow; and I’ve known since I was a preschool child that the Creator holds me in love and all Creation with me, regardless of the disasters we as humankind visit on our world.

Photo by S Dean

“I will never be further from you than your heart.”

~~The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat

 

** All photos not otherwise attributed were taken by CL Francisco

 

 

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Watching Lewy body dementia move in

2nd in a series of posts about the author’s experience

of Lewy body dementia

 

All I can tell you is that the train is coming. We can feel the vibration in the tracks and hear the rumble in the distance. I can’t tell you when it will arrive, how fast it’s traveling, or even what direction it’s coming from. But it’s coming.”

(My neurologist’s words after confirming a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia)

Photo by Fr.Latreille

 

I always imagined it would be cancer; after all, cancer is the great leveler of our time. Lewy body dementia (LBD) came as a complete surprise, partly because I’d never heard of it—but then not many people have. Few support groups exist; few physicians are familiar with it. People say it lies somewhere between the Alzheimer’s acute dementia and Parkinson’s progressive motor dysfunction, but when my GP took an on-line LBD seminar, he came away with one conclusion offered by experts over and over again: “We don’t know.”

Photo CL Francisco

 

So I decided to try journaling from time to time, reflecting on my own experience of LBD. Maybe someone will find it helpful.

sketch by CL Francisco

I noticed a slight mental slow-down in the fall of 2018, but my first real clue that something was wrong was when I started falling asleep without warning, almost as if I had narcolepsy. A sleep test showed me to be one of a very small percentage of people who physically act out dreams during REM sleep; normal folk are pretty much immobilized. Apparently REM sleep disorders are red flags for LBD, so neurological tests followed and confirmed its likelihood (84%). A higher degree of certainty would require an autopsy.

Soon I noticed that words didn’t come to me when I tried to write. I got more dependent on the thesaurus. I couldn’t hold complex thoughts in my mind. Reluctantly, I retired from writing. Meanwhile, the sudden drops into sleep intensified. Short-term memory loss erased the books I read. Each book faded quietly into the LBD wallpaper within a few months. The old joke about people with dementia endlessly re-reading their favorite books is no joke.

Everything always seems to become more and more itself over time, and LBD is no exception. My memory loss continues apace. My balance and physical stamina have noticeably worsened, as have a variety of autonomic functions. But perhaps the most difficult thing about this strange disease is the sleepiness. Such an innocuous word, sleepiness. Along with its equally bland opposite: alertness. Boring, everyday words. Sleepy was something I used to associate with bedtime or tedious meetings. Alert was something I could access on demand.

Photo CL Francisco

But LBD has introduced me to a whole new order of not-alert. People talk about mental fog, or fug . . . this is a mental swamp, a bog, with hidden drop-offs into unconsciousness. I feel as if I walk through my days in a viscous pool. A port-a-bog! The day’s normal routine can’t penetrate it. I never wake up. It takes all my mental and physical strength just to stay afloat in daily life.

Photo CL Francisco

 

I’m deeply grateful for the drug modafinil: it takes some of the edge off. I’ve also found a few things that can offer temporary relief, at least for me:

  • Compelling fiction: if the characters are skillfully drawn, the tension tight, the writing clear, and nothing too horrendously tragic happens, I can read and stay awake . . . as long as I don’t get too comfortable. My favorite authors are people like Ursula K. Le Guin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Laurie R. King, Robin Hobb, and Dorothy R. Sayers.
  • Total absorption in creative tasks has been a lifeline—painting, drawing, and crafting. The trick here is that it has to be intensely absorbing and challenging. If it bores me, I fall asleep.
  • Long walks in the woods have never failed me yet. No more than a few yards into the trees, my mind clears. Clarity and life wait there, as they always have. But when I return, low-lying clouds move in as soon as my feet hit the pavement. I also take photos when I walk . . . I just have trouble staying awake to edit them when I return home.
  • Intense emotional encounters with others also penetrate the fog, but I can hardly schedule those, good or bad. They’re a kind of grace . . . and here I include awareness of the presence of Spirit/Deity/All That Is/God/ess, whatever word you choose. But since traditional prayer involves silence, quiet, and closed eyes, I tend to do my praying as I walk in the woods. That way I don’t fall asleep.
Photo CL Francisco

LBD is often characterized by hallucinations, usually visual ones. The dissolving boundary between normal reality and the Lewy bodies’ alternate reality is still in its early stages for me. I’ve had few actual hallucinations, but when I drop into episodes of sudden sleep, vivid dreams come immediately. Here I’m making a distinction between episodes of involuntary sleep and intentional, lying down sleep. The waking seems different, although that may just be the suddenness of awakening at my desk (by dropping something, falling over onto the keyboard, etc).

Art by CL Francisco

The intensity of these dreams and their extraordinary presence often result in serious disorientation when I wake up, far more intense than any awakening to a strange room. The best image I can offer is of a deep, swift-flowing river of color and emotion that runs alongside the more solid reality we think of as normal. It reminds me a bit of what I’ve read of the Aboriginal experience of the dreamtime. When I wake from it, I feel long moments of near-vertigo. I stagger between the two streams of consciousness until I can regain my balance in the here and now. Even so, my sense of self remains shaky. I’ll often get up from my desk and get something to eat to ground me in my body. Comfort food, literally.

It’s not such a long stretch to imagine myself disappearing into that tumbling chaos of color and never finding my way back. But as Wayne Oates, an old mentor of mine, used to say, “That’s a basket of summer fruit. It’ll come into season in its time. You can think about it then.”

Paul Cezanne, “Still Life with Basket of Fruit.”

 

 

 

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For everything there is a season . . .

1st in a series of posts about the author’s experience

of Lewy body dementia

 

Autumn Tears, Autumn Prayers. CL Francisco

As the solar year hovers at the nadir of its cycle, and winter draws us into its dark night, I find myself turning to the near-impossible task of writing a professional farewell.

Last autumn I began experiencing early symptoms of what doctors soon identified as Lewy body dementia. If it sounds familiar to you, it’s probably  because both Robin Williams and Ted Turner were given the same diagnosis (sadly, Robin Williams was diagnosed only after his death). Although close to 2 million Americans suffer with this disease, until recently it remained largely unknown. The publicity these celebrity casualties have received has attracted the public eye and encouraged vital new research into Lewy body dementia.

Lewy body dementia is an acute degenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Susan Schneider Williams, Robin Williams’ wife, called it, “the terrorist inside my husband’s brain.”  It knows nothing of mercy, only destruction. In my own case, it was diagnosed early, because of a relatively uncommon symptom that led me to a sleep lab. Since then the memory loss and verbal impoverishment have become obvious, along with many other physical symptoms. I can’t begin to imagine the agony Robin Williams and his wife experienced without any explanation for his deterioration. At least I have a framework for understanding.

I will write no more books. I don’t have the words, or the memory to hold plot lines in my mind. Just writing this post has taken a ridiculously long time and required the constant use of a thesaurus. But I’m fortunate so far: my daily life hasn’t been catastrophically altered. To a stranger’s eye, I still function like any average senior woman.

I want to thank all my readers for their love and support. It has been a privilege to be welcomed into so many homes with Yeshua’s Cats–and an astonishing gift to walk with Yeshua through a wonderland of fantasy! My books will remain available for as long as there is any interest, but I will no longer advertise them or offer promotional deals. They will endure or fade away through word of mouth. Getting through each day is challenge enough.

My art and photography are less impaired than my words, so I will post images from time to time, with short messages. The Autumn Tears image above is one of two pieces of art that I created in autumn of 2018, when the earliest symptoms were emerging (although I didn’t recognize them as symptoms). The second image (below) is a photo collage of a dream. The dream wouldn’t let me go until I’d captured this central image: a shabby and unlikely old woman in a ruinous house, holding out a glowing gift in a small battered box, while  wings hover in the background. I find myself wondering if that dream might have been an image of my life and writing in the face of the gathering shadows. If so, I am content.

In the hands of the One,

 

 

GIft. CL Francisco

 

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Moving Back into the Light

My apologies to you all for disappearing for so long! I’ve been battling a bizarre antibiotic-resistant infection picked up at a hospital last year, and have been unable to work for many months, but I’m slowly improving.

I’ve spend untold hours working on digital mosaics and computer busywork (since I haven’t had the wit to write), but at least I’ve accomplished one thing: I’ve finished transcribing my 1993 PhD dissertation and uploaded it to academia.edu. The title is:

Native American Shields, Old Symbols for a New Spiritual Quest in the Contemporary Women’s Movement

and if you’re interested, you can find it at:

https://www.academia.edu/37357137/

SBTS Graduation, 1993

 

The dissertation was based on a summer’s on-site research with Euro-American women raised in the Church who were attending workshops on Native American spirituality–specifically to build shields. I interviewed 40 women about their reasons for leaving the Church and choosing a Native American spiritual path, using Marion Woodman’s revisions of Jungian psychology to analyze the interviews and shield images. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Meinrad Craighead provided critiques of the Church from within. I concluded with a my own Jungian critique of the Church–and suggestions for constructive change.

Although 25 years have passed, the issues are still current, as are the women’s responses to the pain they experienced in the Church. My own thoughts have grown and changed in the passing years, but I still find myself content to stand by what I wrote then. Below is an edited version of the dissertation’s final chapter. You can also find it here, where I’ve uploaded a number of the photos I took of the shield workshops (see drop-down menu under Native American Shields, above). Descriptions of the workshops are in the dissertation.

Brooke Medicine Eagle

 

 

I dreamed I saw a giant tree, branches bare and cold, blown by the winds from place to place, rootless, tumbling across the plains. It stood precariously for a moment, and then fell with almost deliberate slowness, and in its fall it crushed beneath its branches the vast and delicate wings of a golden butterfly. As the butterfly died, its wings broke into brittle fragments and blew away like leaves in a winter wind. The great barren tree tumbled on, coming to rest at last, upright, supported by the strength of a living tree, caught and held by their intertwined branches.

Individuals are sometimes blessed with dreams that reach beyond the limits of their own lives into the heart of the reality that surrounds them. I believe the dream above to be such a gift. In it I felt as if I were seeing with the eyes of a woman like the one from my research, below, who experienced violence at the hands of the Church:

The Church kills dreams in women. It does it ruthlessly, without concern or love . . . Any woman who says she does not feel massive pain in this society and in the Church is living a lie, or she’s just burying it. It will surface, or it will kill her (“Leslie”).

The tree of my dream is a broken remnant of Meinrad Craighead’s “tree which lives at both ends.” The divine energy of the mind has been disconnected from the energy of the body, and the restless movement of masculine aggression has abandoned its roots in “God as mother of the entire fabric of creation.” The great barren institution of the Church rolls across the Earth, rootless, a truncated cross rather than a living tree, impersonal and uncaring in its destruction. Driven by the winds of arid masculinity, it crushes the fragile and beautiful butterfly of women’s hopes for transformation, scattering those hopes and women’s shattered lives to the winds, leaving women to search alone in the wilderness, without any visible paths, for the presence of the One in their lives.

Meinrad Craighead, “Tree of Life” http://www.meinradcraighead.com/

Although the dream scene is a wintry one, still it holds out hope for the spring. The rootless tree is caught and held upright by the strength of a second tree firmly rooted in the Earth, its branches locking the barren tree in a complex embrace, pressing the barren trunk into its own contact with the Earth. In the terms of the previous chapter’s discussion, the living tree could symbolize the living Church—the flowering Church—wherever it is found, as well as other living traditions, such as the Native American, which draw deep sustenance from the fertile, feminine Earth. The grafting of such Earth-affirming energies into its life embodies the strongest hope for the reflowering of the Church.

The two questions asked at the beginning of the previous chapter hang heavy in the silence of the dream. Can the Church affirm the balanced symbolization of the Holy in images and rituals that do reverence to both the feminine and the masculine? Can the Church affirm women’s unique insights into the central mystery of the Christ? The answers are not yet clear. As the women interviewed emphasized in their responses, the first necessary step is the recognition of fully realized feminine wholeness in the Church and in the nature of the One. Without the presence of this feminine wholeness—not the depotentiated feminine of Christian tradition—neither reconciliation with the Church’s lost women nor the healing of its own wounds can be found.

Women seeking religious meaning through Native American spirituality seek the same essential treasure: their feminine Beingness, the feminine God-image in their hearts. At this time the Church does not offer its women any reliable access to the specifically feminine matrix of life. Without a structured means of access to the feminine within the Church, most women who are able to articulate their need will simply drift away, as those interviewed for this research have done—embittered, shattered, grieving, relieved, or simply abandoning an irrelevant piece of history, as each woman’s experience may be. In many cases they will take Jesus with them, alive in their hearts, but no longer related to the structures of the Church. But until they are able to affirm their essential femininity, they cannot encounter him as the bridegroom, the creative masculine within, the self-sacrificing guide to the feminine face of the One. And unless the Church offers pathways to the feminine within its own doctrines, few of these women will seek the bridegroom there.

Although the Church has treasured up the most significant life-preserving mystery of the Western world, it faces the catastrophic possibility that the life may be draining away from its symbols more rapidly than the Church can apply remedies. Dissatisfied women represent a movement away from the Church that has its echoes in rapidly diversifying New Age phenomena, the emerging men’s movement, and deep ecology. People speak glibly of a contemporary paradigm shift, not realizing what such a shift might mean. If a paradigm shift is primarily away from old patterns of reality, without containing within itself the balanced fullness of a new paradigm, disaster could result. The abandonment of traditional religious structures without firm alternatives to replace them would, as Jung saw clearly, bring catastrophic chaos to society.

Unless the Church can open itself to re-experience the numinous heart of its message in symbols that speak to the needs of the contemporary age, then it cannot offer itself to the world as the living body of Christ. The urgent need of the industrialized West is for wholeness within and without: the balancing of masculine and feminine and the sacred marriage that leads to authentic encounter with the face of the One manifested within each human being and in the whole of embodied reality. In the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Church has preserved this life-engendering mystery, but it has severed it from the Earth, and from the balanced wholeness of humanity’s most authentic experience of the Holy.

It is futile for the Church to try to respond constructively to critiques of its institutional structures without seeking to change the spiritual and psychological bases of those structural problems. Most of the respondents in my research could not conceive of a Church free of the destructiveness they had experienced within its walls. I believe this inability to imagine ecclesiastical change is rooted primarily in despair over the Church’s doctrinal bases, and only secondarily in pain resulting from its institutional abuses. If the Church were to address Christian women’s despair at its ultimate source—in patriarchal formulations of the nature of deity and women’s insignificance in that masculine equation—the abuses could be transformed through a natural process of growth. Embrace of the feminine matrix of life could move in organic procession toward reverence for the embodied cosmos and awareness of its participation in the Holy.

Meinrad Craighead, “Vessel” ( http://www.meinradcraighead.com/)

Like Meinrad Craighead, each Christian woman who confronts her pain and chooses to remain in the Church faces a long and lonely struggle for possession of her soul. In a recent letter, one respondent still struggling to stay in the Church wrote the following:

I still believe in the Church, but I see my sister clergywomen worn down by carrying the pain of the churches and their own pain, and that of their sisters in the pews. I watch knowing that I will not go back until I can see a way to work in the middle of that pain . . . . I feel like the support and teachers I need are out there (based in other traditions], and that eventually I will find enough of a vision to reenter parish ministry (“Elizabeth”).

Singly, in small groups, and sometimes in community, such women are spinning strong and supple anchors for a new web of wholeness. Each weaves her own experiences into those of her sisters, connecting hopes and personal symbols into the outer ring of a spreading web, working steadily inward toward the center, in spite of personal storms and human destructiveness.

For a woman who has birthed a shield, that center may be held by the power of her shield’s vision, a reminder of a beckoning presence encountered in the wilderness or within her own soul. A shield captures a vision of wholeness, sometimes with the fullness of the masculine complementarity, sometimes emphasizing the feminine alone. Like any true symbol, a shield that touches a woman’s depths will continue to draw her in, pulling her forward toward the Self as long as she remains creatively engaged with her journey to the center it symbolizes.

Jungian psychology bids a woman turn inward to listen to the voice of her deepest Self, and, having heard, to manifest her experience in the physical world, through writing, artistic production, or dance. Native American wisdom pushes a woman out into the created world to experience the call of the One and to bring that encounter to physical expression through song, dance, ritual movement, and the creation of spiritually significant ritual objects. Native America meets Jungian psychology at the center of the mandala, at the midpoint of the flowering cross of Christ, where spirit incarnates in flesh, and flesh embodies spirit.

Meinrad Craighead, “Tree at the Crossroads”
http://www.meinradcraighead.com/

The Church must rediscover its true center in the ecstasy of immanence as well as transcendence if it is to embody the mystery of incarnation for the world. Women seeking participatory ritual in worship are reaching out with a true human instinct for experience of the wholeness of the One. The danger confronting them is that without the structured guidelines of proven traditional paths, they may fall into fascination with the psychic numinosity of  destructive complexes—rather than with the creative pull of the Self.

Traditionally, the mysteries of the Church have facilitated experience of the One through such proven paths; however, the patriarchal bias of those mysteries has distorted human reality to such an extent that a critical mass of spiritual anguish has been achieved in the contemporary Western world. The paradigm is shifting, whether we will it or not. As the old consensus dissolves and social fabric unravels, American society is being split by those straining to cover themselves with the tatters of receding traditions and by those eager to push ahead into new revelation.

This split characterizes the contemporary American Church just as it characterized Mediterranean religious expression in the New Testament period. The cross of Christ, however, in its paradoxical fullness, fully supports neither of these opposing energies: it offers a point of reconciliation at its heart. It preserves the Law down to the last jot and tittle, while demanding new wineskins for the new wine of the Creative Spirit. It introduces a sword of separation into the most intimate fellowship, but draws all humanity to itself in love. It marks the intersection of proven and reliable old roads of tradition with the ongoing creative paths of the One, who is eternally making all things new. The essence of Christ’s message for the world is found in the paradoxical presence of both ancient wisdom and newness of life born from his passion and resurrection. The yoke of Christ to which the Church is called is a double one, harnessing polar opposites in creative tension: immanence with transcendence, masculine with feminine, flesh with spirit, light with dark, death with life.

As I opened my sacred circle to the surrounding forest at the completion of the vision quest that birthed the concluding chapters of this dissertation, the setting sun created a glowing shield from a previously unseen spider’s web. The hoop of the web was perfect in its roundness. The dying shaft of light that turned the web to flame illuminated only a few radiating strands, etching a golden cross against the shadowed trees, a cross that reached its arms out to touch the web’s circle at the four points of the medicine wheel. The web only glowed for a moment before the shaft of light was lost among the shadows, but it burned its image into my heart as a symbol of the longed-for wholeness of all visible and invisible being: the cross of Christ woven into the luminous heart of Creation.

Seek, Find

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