Nearly four years ago now my cousins and aunt moved up north. For the past three years my husband and I have visited once a year, staying for about a week at a time. My husband and I stay at my aunt’s “apartment” adjoining my cousin’s house. While we do see my cousins daily, the encounters are generally brief. We don’t want to bother them, so we don’t invite ourselves over. However, they do invite us over for dinner for one evening of our stay each year.
Now, conversations with my cousin are always interesting. One year, when everyone still lived downstate, there was a family gathering with both my family and my husband’s family. At the time my cousin was retired, but to earn some extra money he drove a school bus. During dinner, he brought up the subject of a field trip he took the kids to recently. To the morgue. My cousin, not being the type to just sit in the bus for hours, went on the field trip too. My cousin was fascinated by it all and wanted to tell us all about it. While I didn’t see anything wrong with that, and that’s saying something since I’m probably one of the most squeamish people on the face of the earth, my husband let me know that he was appalled. I learned then that certain subjects were off-limits at the dinner table.
While my cousin’s personality has not changed in the ensuing years, the tone of the dinnertime conversation has turned darker and more personal. One such conversation involved my father. All through his growing up and into his early adult years my cousin and my father were very close. My father lived with his family for many years until he married my mother. During this particular conversation my cousin was telling stories from those years past. Happy memories, then not so happy memories that were made happier thanks to my father. Finally, the conversation moved to the painful, traumatic memory of my cousin telling my father in the nursing home that he would have to have his leg amputated. The rest of the conversation had this somber tone. The good memories of my father were overshadowed by this one single event. An event that clearly had been troubling my cousin for many years and continued to trouble him deeply. At this point, my father had been dead for nearly 17 years.
Dwelling in the past. I’m no stranger to it. My aunt, his mother, does the same thing. I don’t think there’s a conversation we have where she doesn’t bring up something from the past. Sometimes it’s happy memories, wishing she was young again. But many times it’s what I call the “would’ve, should’ve, could’ve” type of conversation. My father should’ve taken better care of himself, then he wouldn’t have gotten dementia…. I should’ve taken better care of him so that the nurses in the nursing home wouldn’t have caused the infection that led to his leg being amputated…. She should have insisted that her sister get a new doctor then she wouldn’t have gotten the debilitating stroke….
Nothing can change the past. Dwelling on it doesn’t help. The advice I gave my cousin, who clearly felt as though he let my father down in some way, was to live his life so that my father would be proud. My father wouldn’t want him wallowing. He would want him to lead a full, happy life.
The advice I give my aunt: what’s past is past. You can’t change what happened those many years ago. You just have to count your blessings now. To that she replies that she has no blessings and that there’s nothing good about her life now. Still she continues to focus on how things used to be and on the fact that they can’t be that way again. Understandable. It’s difficult to change perspective when you’re in your late 80s, basically confined to home. No friends and family (other than your son’s family) close by to visit often.
Me, I tend to put the past behind me. What’s done is done. If I can’t do anything to change or fix it, then there’s no point in dwelling on it. So, in that way I do take my own advice. But, my problem is that I dwell on the future. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, my mind eventually drifts off to all the things that need doing or that I want to do in the future, whether that be an hour from now or a year from now. It’s not like there’s only one long to-do list in my head, though that’s there too. But mixed in with the to-dos are what ifs. What if this happens. What if that happens. I try to plan for every contingency. All hypothetical and I never really work out solutions to all the what ifs. So, I get more and more anxious and lose sleep about things that are out of my control and about things that may or may not happen (and, in my experience, rarely, if ever, do happen).
Dwelling in the past and dwelling in the future. What about dwelling in the present? Why do many of us find it so difficult to do that? We are each given only so many days on this earth. We are each given only so many days to enjoy the blessings of God’s creation. We are each given only so many days to contribute to the betterment of God’s creation. By dwelling on the past or dwelling on the future we are are letting the present along with its blessings and opportunities pass right by.
My aunt’s large living room window looks out over a lake. When my husband and I stay there we sleep on the sleeper sofa which faces this window. Every morning I love to watch the sunrise over the lake. On our most recent trip, the last night we were there, the sky was clear and the moon nearly full and there was a moonrise over the lake. I was enchanted. During the day I like to watch the few boats on the lake when it’s calm. I even like to watch the waves when the water is choppy. To me it’s very soothing.
At one point in our vacation, I briefly sat in my aunt’s chair. She usually sits there for hours either reading the newspaper or watching TV. Looking at her view from this chair, I understood why her perspective is so dismal (at least in part). Her view from this chair encompasses the hummingbird feeder outside her window (good), a large tree in the corner of the lot (a desolate area where no flowers grow, the lake is obsured, and where there’s a well-used clothesline), and her TV. If I sat in this chair day in and day out, with this view, I too would be depressed! Why she chose to set up her living room thus, I have no idea. Personally, I would’ve rearranged the furniture to hopefully get a better perspective on my little world and on life in general.
Changing our perspective requires rearrangement of our living spaces, whether that be rearrangement of the physical or rearrangement of the mental. Either way, bringing our thoughts back to the everyday blessings and opportunities that God gives us requires, for some of us, a great effort. I believe, in the long run, that that effort is well worth it.
