aging

Spiritual journey: A word

/ Fran Haley / 6 Comments

I have reached a gray season.

Not in terms of this January morning, with its oyster sky and neutral-colored doves settling into the birdbath under the naked crape myrtle as I write. Not the frenzied darksilver squirrels darting about with their elegant question-mark tails. Nor the grass, which isn’t gray, just seemingly unable to decide if it wants to be brown or green, dead or alive.

Gray, but not the concrete driveway or my husband’s secondhand silver car…replacing the trusty car we had for almost fifteen years, totaled at summer’s end. A driver ran a stop sign at the crossroads nearby. My husband was driving our old car. He wasn’t injured. He is a survivor of so many things that it would take a book to tell it all.

Survival. A word worthy of contemplation. But it’s not the word I have in mind this morning, nor is the word gray, really. I am just describing what I see through my own window. The way things are in this moment. My now.

When I say I have reached a gray season, I mean an in-between point, like when the holidays and their glittering festivities are over (although my Christmas tree is still up; my husband likes the lights on these long winter evenings). A point when another year has gone and a new one is unfolding with who knows what hidden in its folds for us all. A taking-stock season. A reevaluation of priorities through the lens of what I am able—and not able—to do now. Not what I will do tomorrow, next week, this summer…or in the indeterminate days or years of life remaining to me, when youth is gone and aging gets to write the rest of the story.

People tell me I do not age. My body tells me otherwise. Minor aches and pains are the telltale signs of Time. I am incrementally slower than I used to be. More deliberate and careful. Not to mention presently shaking off mild bronchitis. I have a friend who stayed physically active and kept working hard because, in her words, “I refuse to get old.” But she did, she is, and dementia has taken control. So much for living nearly a century. I have lived well over half of one and feel the weight of it. Paradoxically, people ask when I plan to retire. Fun question. Most retirees I know are still working. Staying alive is expensive.

So I come to a plateau of asking: What is truly worth my time, my energy, my money? What is necessary? What is not? What is wise? A shedding-place, you might say. Born of a desire to get rid of material things I do not need as well as thoughts, perspectives, ideas, failures, vanities, even (shocking my own self with this) memories and losses that I am tired of carrying.

If I strip all this away (envisioning long strips of bark peeling off the crape myrtle as it grows), what do I find?

My spirit, ageless and weightless, eternally longing for God who breathed it in the first place. The Author of everything I ever truly loved in my whole life’s journey, the Giver of every good and perfect gift, miraculously drawing me along. God who sustained me to this point. God who will see me through the rest of the journey, ever how weary and unable I become. God whose sovereignty is absolute, even when I cannot see it or sense it.

As I write—not making this up, honest—the sun pierces the grayness outside my window.

Let me reveal the word I had in mind when I began this post.

Amen.

Technically it means so be it or truly. It is a word signifying acceptance.

It just so happens to be the word on a silver necklace one of my sons gave me for Christmas.

It comes at a time when day-to-day plans take a backseat to my husband’s ongoing health issues and my own limitations. A letting go, to keep on going. A not quite here-nor-there-time. A time of finding freedom within the very constraints of Time. I’ve even decided—again surprising myself—to let my gray hair grow out because I am tired of fighting the inevitable.

So, yes, literally a gray season, in so many ways.

My now. I am learning to embrace it.

Amen.

with thanks to Margaret Simon for kicking off the 2026 Spiritual Journey gatherings on the first Thursday of each month, and for this new logo, which I love. I am posting two days late, on Saturday, as it took me awhile to get to this. So be it (Amen).

On the shifting of seasons

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

Outside

in the blaze of summer

the barest hint of change

In the crescendo of cicada song

a whisper of waning

Almost imperceptibly

the shift begins

Inside

climate controlled

time suspended

Isolation

but not desolation

as inevitably, in life,

the shift begins

I walk the hospital floor

thinking that cicadas don’t know

Or do they?

Their song throbs loudest

in the summer sun that remains

This same sun that

casts shadows

where I must walk

also casts unexpected rainbows

at my feet.

Good-bye, mighty Nik

/ Fran Haley / 16 Comments

Nikolaus, 2004. Age 2. 

Dear Nikolaus,

I write to celebrate you and your long, long life.

To thank you for the joy you brought and the love you gave for so many years.

To ask your forgiveness.

When you first came to our family, we were elated.

April 2002. Age 3 months.

You see, we’d been looking for a little dog because we had a little boy who wanted one so badly. Big dogs frightened him.

But you were perfect.

April 2002. Nikolaus age 3 months. Cadillac Man age 4.

And so you grew up together.

You weren’t always easy, but you were always, always loved. Despite the countless accidents in the house and that time you snuck a chicken strip off of little Cadillac Man’s plate and ran for all you were worth with your booty. Not to mention how you figured out a way to climb on top of the furniture to get the boys’ Valentine and Easter chocolate. And ate it all, leaving only the wrappers behind. More than once. How did you do it and not get sick?

We began to think, all things considered, that you might be immortal. After all, you outlasted legions of other pets. The boys began to joke about you plotting the demise of every other dog, for they came and went throughout the years, but you remained. No one questioned your alpha status. Not even the dogs seven times your size, when you took their rawhides and their pillows for your own. They just sat, blinking in respectful disbelief, at your Napoleonic powers.

There’s so much to say, for we shared so much together. I am thankful for my special place in your little heart. How, when you were young and strong, you’d jump up on the couch to curl up beside me or to crawl in my lap. For the hours I spent working on the computer and you were snuggled behind me, between my back and the chair. I loved you and your deep, abiding warmth, always near, just being. Just together.

How the boys loved you. How they laughed as we tried to teach you to roll over, to sit and beg, the two tricks you’d pull off multiple times in succession just to get one treat.

How much comfort you gave them when they were hurting, from boyhood to manhood. They held you in their arms, but you, well—you were holding their hearts all along.

January 2017. Cadillac Man, age 19, celebrating Nik’s 15th birthday with a car ride.

Time is no friend, is it, old sweet Nik. Not when it takes your youth so that you can’t jump anymore but have to be picked up and carried. Not when it turns your face and paws so white. Not when it takes your sight, your hearing, even your ability to understand exactly where you are and what’s going on.

Here’s what I marvel over: That you tried to run through the grass like always, even when you couldn’t see. That you could still find me in bathroom getting ready for work each morning. That you never forgot where your treats were, or that you should get one after coming in from outside, even when it had to be broken into small pieces for you to chew. I knew you could only find them by smell; that’s why I put your broken-up treats on the kitchen rug, so you wouldn’t push them all across the floor trying to get them into your mouth.

I marvel over your ever-voracious appetite, how you ran for your bowl every morning, even if we had to guide you just a bit.

And I worried when you started losing weight.

May 2018. Age 16. 

The vet said your blood work was amazing for a dog of your age; never saw the like. Said your heart was strong. Said things like cancer can make a dog lose weight despite plenty of food, and it wouldn’t show in the blood. Gave you the pain medicine which made you sleep but also tore your bowels up so that we couldn’t give it to you anymore.

And still you rallied, although every day you got thinner and thinner.

Cadillac Man watched you staggering and falling in the yard.

Mom, he looks like a skeleton. He’s just going in circles. 

Mom, it may be time.

Mom, I just got on the scales with him. He’s under seven pounds.

Three weeks before, you were about nine pounds.

When you were a young dog, you were nearly twenty pounds.

On Saturday, when I gave you your last bath, I could see every vertebra on your back, could feel every knob on your tiny tail. For the first time in your life, you sat in the bathwater, too weak to stand.

When we wrapped you in your “Happiness is a Dachshund” blanket to take you to another vet, I didn’t know it was going to be good-bye.

I didn’t.

I thought maybe another medication would help. Or another suggestion. You’d made it so far, so well, until then. The regular vet said your heart was strong, so . . .

The new vet said:

I can’t fix the blindness.

I can’t fix the deafness.

I can’t fix the severe cognitive impairment.

You can run tests to see why he’s losing the weight, but it would only be for academic purposes. Just to know. He’s a very old, weak dog.

Cadillac Man looked at me, holding you in his arms:

Mom, there’s hardly anything left of him.

How to let you go like this, when you’d been so utterly trusting and loving your entire life?

You looked at me with your tired, cloudy eyes, and I wasn’t sure what you were seeing. Maybe me. Maybe not.

I couldn’t know how much pain you felt; you never complained. You just kept going, for it’s all you knew to do.

I loved you. I struggled then, I struggle now with the decision, but I believe the boy—the man—who loved you best knew what was best.

And so we stroked your sweet head when you breathed your last—one tiny sigh, of contentment, of resignation, of release—utterly, utterly peaceful.

And I take comfort where I can find it. When I read about euthanizing suffering pets, when I talk to others who’ve been there, I don’t question the logic. Of course no one wants to watch their beloved endure prolonged suffering. When I think of your ravaged little body, I know you couldn’t bear much more. Your determination, your will, was astounding. That’s where I struggle. That’s why I write. It’s a matter of the spirit, see.

I write to celebrate our long run together. Sixteen years.

I write to thank you for your unconditional love, and to tell you that mine is just as unconditional. I love you still, even now that you’re gone.

I write to thank you for the joy you brought to two young boys for so long. You’re indelibly written on their hearts, as long as they live.

I write to say I’m sorry. For all the times I lost my patience, for the times I could have made more time, for being part of that last, anguishing decision. But if you were going to go, I was going to be there with you, all the way.

And I ask your forgiveness, because the weight is so hard to carry. But old age and sickness are hard to carry, too, aren’t they.

For something so little, you are so mighty, Nik.

I imagine you always will be.

Eating life

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

My friends and I spoke recently of family members in various stages of dementia and failing health.

Our declining ones hallucinate. They see children who aren’t there and can relate what the children are doing: running down the hall, making a mess with cereal, simply standing there in the room. They speak of loved ones long dead, as if they are well and visit regularly. Time is a viscous fluid in the brain of someone nearing the end of life; it is often hard to discern if the person is speaking of events that occurred yesterday, today, or fifty years ago.

Sometimes the visions are unnerving.

My father would visit Grannie, my mother’s mother, in the hospital. He’d help feed her. One day during their conversation, Grannie casually told my father: “I see Earline over there.”

My mother’s sister, who died of cancer years before. She never married and lived at home with Grannie.

Daddy, taken aback, asked, “Where is she?”

Grannie pointed. “Over there against the wall. Under the clock.”

There was a clock, in fact. High on the bare hospital wall.

Daddy said, “But . . . ”

Grannie cut him off. Looked him right in the eye: “I know she’s dead.”

Never one to tolerate fancies, my father asked, “Well, what does she look like?”

Grannie hesistated. Maybe grasping for words. “Kind of grave-y.”

A mere observation, without emotion or alarm. She may as well have been commenting on the weather or the hospital food.

I told this story when the topic came up with my friends, as we commiserated on watching our aged loved ones endure these haunting effects.

“It’s so strange,” said one friend, who has two relatives suffering with dementia. “Neither of them ever liked to eat eggs. Never in their whole lives. Now that’s all they ask for – Can you bring me some scrambled eggs? Run on over to IHOP and get me some eggs.”

I tried to recall if my grandmothers and mother-in-law made this request. But they’d all liked eggs; it wouldn’t have been unusual.

While my friends talked, I kept thinking There’s something to this egg thing.

It’s true that the tastes of dementia patients can change, that they sometimes develop cravings for things they never liked before. The answer could be that simple; eggs are a simple food.

They’re considered brain food. How interesting that a person succumbing to dementia should begin to crave them. Numerous articles on foods good for the brain reference choline, a nutrient found in egg yolks, that helps improve memory, brain cell communication, and even fetal brain development. Eggs are protein, the building block of the brain, the building block of life itself.

This is where I leap from the physical, the scientific, to the metaphysical. All around the world, since ancient times, the egg symbolizes life. In some belief systems, life-energy. An object small enough to hold in your hand, the egg represents the universe, health, nature awakening, new life about to emerge, immortality.

And hope.

They may sense it, they may not, those whose brains are slowly giving way. Perhaps it is the final rallying cry of the brain alone, this impulse to eat eggs, in an effort to hold on, to carry on.

Can you please bring me some eggs? 

Eating health, even as it ebbs away.

Eating hope.

They are eating life.