A Metaphor Topography
As a budding reflexologist, a map of the body’s systems and organs is something I’ve learned to imprint upon my perception of the feet, hands, and ears of clients. Through alternating pressure touch techniques, a reflexologist can discover an intricate topography in the feet which tells a story of a client’s stresses. Where a person holds stresses and how these impact an individual over time is key to helping them navigate their way to wellness. Combining this perspective with my other character traits of poet and artist, I delight in those unexpected glimpses of when the feet can be to the body what the eyes are to the soul. Don’t steal that tagline! It belongs to my business practice and fits my approach to the discipline.
My personal healing adventures have nurtured a love for the scientific, technical, and nerdy details of anatomy and the physiology of the body’s amazing systems. For my memoir excursion below, however, I prefer to hang out in a soulful, imaginal realm of curiosity, to discover what I am ready to know. What comes next is a kind of map-meaning legacy that emerged spontaneously during a focused writing group prompt based on the working theme, Write for Your Life Road Trip. Since road trip here is standing in as the metaphor for our memoir practice of remembering what matters, what lingers in the background, we honor what is waiting to emerge and be spoken. In this way, we provide a snap shot --- a written polaroid of a moment caught between memory and meaning.
In September (2022), I completed a brief case study on the possible benefits of reflexology for a person living with advanced Alzheimer’s. Sandra, whom I mention in part below, is unlikely to recall how much she relaxed when her feet were in my hands. What I find intriguing are the subtle improvements I observed over the course of only ten days. I began to think more expansively about maps, real and metaphorical, after providing reflexology to Sandra and listening to her altered speech patterns over the weeks I observed her.
A little more context might help here: Sandra lives with her daughter, who is my sister --- yeah, technically my half-sister. But there is a loving affinity that has emerged in recent years between us. After some discussion in considering Sandra as a case study participant, my sister decided that timing the reflexology sessions at bedtime would be best all around. Thus began a ten-day stretch of reflexology sessions every other evening.
An unusual advantage I experienced with Sandra is that I was able to live in the same home for several weeks. I had moved from Washington to the same region in California but had a housing gap of a few weeks. I welcomed the invitation to share in my sister’s household, which also contains two young children and their father. Working with Sandra in such a loving environment enabled me to see subtle differences in how she coped with her condition as we progressed through the ten-day focus and beyond.
Sandra has some elements of Sundowner’s Syndrome. This shows up as increasing levels of anxiety as the sun closes in on the horizon. Because I am generally making two or three treks to the bathroom during the night (a legacy of injuries sustained in a car crash three years ago), I noted that Sandra was frequently awake, standing as if on pause on the upstairs landing, confused between three directions: the bathroom, her bedroom, and the stairway leading down to the first floor. Notably, after three sessions, she began to sleep through the night and her core balance improved. Her episodes of feeling lost and useless diminished in intensity but remained present. It would take a longer period of study to see how sustainable such improvements could be. It should be mentioned that Sandra was on two medications, one for memory support and the other for hypertension. It has been a few months since I performed the study and a third medication has been added, which addresses part of the depressive progression of Alzheimer’s.
My thinking about maps has changed dramatically since working with Sandra. When she becomes disoriented, she needs landmarks in her environment, such as people and cues to keep her tethered to the present. Despite her difficulty in articulating full sentences, the sentence fragments she gives us provides a kind of map of her mind’s shifting landscape. Some days she appeared to be on relatively level ground. Most days, however, her fear of losing ground or her vulnerable take on reality, is an ever-rushing river of noise in her head. A new sentence begins to form in her thoughts only to be swept away in her effort to speak it before it is lost to some region we cannot visit. Sandra spoke a particular sentence often: “I need a map to tell me…what am I supposed to be doing?”
In her presence, I
started thinking about her concept of a map that tells us what we are supposed
to be doing. “If only I knew it…I could do it” is another phrase she repeated. Sandra’s
craving for certainty is evident in her questioning and clenching hands, which gradually became less prominent with each session. Losing
her executive functions for making decisions or recognizing the people she sees
every day is a perennial problem. By way of comparison, when most of us
have traveled with a printed map and its locator key, we can generally orient
ourselves through unfamiliar territory. But what if we’re already in familiar
territory and the map’s printed key has somehow slipped off the page? Or, the map itself appears upside down and refuses to right itself? How would one cope with that?
When I think of Sandra living with Alzheimer’s, a woman I have known for thirty-five years, I try to understand how she is experiencing life without access to the internal compass that once held her true north. What happens internally that makes her map of the world off-kilter? To have one’s most basic orientation slip away every few minutes or so must feel absolutely terrorizing. This can happen through any number of traumatic events or breakdowns and is not limited to the conditions indicative of a form of dementia. In such a case, who gets to make the maps we live by, then?
As of this writing, I get to see Sandra bi-weekly and give her reflexology on her feet when I visit my sister’s home. There are subtleties in how Sandra responds to her sessions, like letting me know she can feel something happening in her body when I touch certain reflex areas on her feet. Otherwise, she is experiencing each session as if its the first-time ever. Her face lights up when I walk into the room, even though I must reintroduce myself, including how I am related to her daughter. In a bittersweet yet beautiful way, I have learned to moderate my tone of voice and manner of speaking so Sandra feels absolutely safe amidst her diminishing capacity to negotiate her own environment. The environment she has no control over. In our reflexology sessions, however, there is no pressure for Sandra to remember anything. There is only the opportunity to receive and be calmed and to rest. This, I can assure you, is its own faithful destination. *
* Published by permission of my sister, Tara Mason Stogdill, who loves and cares for her mom, Sandra, in the heart of her young family. Love you!
I have loved maps since before I could read. When I was a child and received the occasional monetary allowance for chores completed, one of the first items I ever bought myself was a globe of our earth. My memory for the places I’d been was exceptionally detailed at an early age. It wasn’t always trees or rocks or bodies of water or houses that were my cues. Often it was the memory of who I was with, the feel of the car’s seat beneath my thighs and glutes, and the smell of the wind or rain, the feel of sunlight coming in through the car’s window. What happened around me and within me became crystalized memories, like carbon under immense pressure creates multifaceted diamonds.
From the age of ten onward, I was the designated navigator on hikes and car trips. Consulting a map was a role I cherished. In the eighth grade, when we still lived in Pennsylvania, I once performed a community school project that involved making 3” x 5” hand-drawn maps for groups canvassing neighborhoods. I even color coded the various maps using colored pencils. My teacher was so tickled over the result that she had the maps laminated, so they would endure through more classes and years to come.
About two dozen cross-country road trips have been undertaken in my life. The summer I was ten, my mother made that year’s road trip an unforgettable experience for me. While my stepfather drove us from what is now Santa Clarita (CA) to the Jersey shore and back, Mom read the entire book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown. To this day, I can recall where we were on either route 66, or route 90, or route 80, when certain battles and treaty agreements and their subsequent failures, were read aloud. My mother had an alto singing voice, but she otherwise never read to us as children. She wasn’t a naturally patient person. Except for that one road trip. This made for a uniquely audible map of the Indian territories that we drove through and camped within. I have no idea why she chose that book and that year to read to us. It was 1970 and the book had just been published. But I remain grateful for the immersion into such a detailed history, which that book and that trip provided.
My mother’s reading of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee gave me a glimpse into her that I never had before or after. She was notoriously awful at directions and got lost frequently. And she suffered from night blindness. That may be why I became so good at reading maps. Following recipes and being at home in the kitchen were not Mom’s forte either. But out of family necessity, they became mine. We moved frequently, sometimes twice in a year. This meant new schools and teachers, new churches, strange houses and different routes to the local grocery store and filling station. By the time my mom was the age I am now, which is sixty-three, she had a pronounced alcohol induced dementia. She died during the autumn equinox of 2013, at only seventy-three, unable to recognize my siblings or my voice on the phone. Mom became paralyzed with agoraphobia in her later years, probably because of her inability to orient herself in time and place.
Mom developed her agoraphobia relatively young and over a gradual timeline. I learned that agoraphobia is not just a fear of open spaces, as is commonly assumed. It is more complicated than that. Consensus among various psychiatric journals suggest that agoraphobia relates to an individual’s panicked perception that there is no escape from, or help with, an impending, unnamable doom. They live with an increasing, pervasive feeling that all of life is about to go terribly wrong and no one can stop it because that is how it feels to them. But they can’t necessarily express this in so many words, whether it is trailing a form of dementia or a panic disorder or a traumatic brain injury. Hence, an often compulsive need to limit exposure to people and unfamiliar surroundings. But the unexpected vagaries of life will persist. Loved ones, by necessity, are then forced to navigate these self-diminishing terrains.
I’m not yet clear about why I am suddenly recalling pivotal memories from age ten. But one more wants to make an appearance here. I remember feeling quite old the summer I was ten. I had started to imagine my parents as dead, from a tragic car crash --- hopefully without my brothers and I in the car. I was exhausted from negotiating household and family responsibilities in compensation for my mother’s alcohol diminishing capacities. Every time we moved somewhere new, I ultimately looked around the neighborhood and church we attended for potential foster parents. Just in case we needed them, I thought at the time. I made sure to pick out folks that truly wanted kids and could adopt my siblings and I together.
My cautionary planning was triggered by a near-miss one late, late night on a curvy road edged with cliffs, which I recall as part of the Topatopa Mountains of Ventura, California. My stepfather was driving us home in our unremarkably brown 1965 Chrysler Rambler station wagon. My mother was sleeping off her overindulgence in the front passenger seat. My brothers were in their sleeping bags in the rear, on either side of me. Dad, also under the influence, was over-correcting at every curve in the road. As was my habit by then, I remained hyper-alert while laying on my back, trying to see the stars in the autumn sky but praying for safety the entire way. I wasn’t a deal maker by nature back then, although I was making deals with God that night. My fear of being the only survivor in a family crash was over the top and had stirred up a war in my gut. My prayers that night were mostly of the spare me and my brothers and I will be your faithful slave variety. I didn’t realize until I was a grown woman that God wasn’t looking for kids to enslave. Such a manner of praying was much more reminiscent of my mother’s tone when approaching God.
At one point, in that pivotal car ride, I found myself sprawled over the front seat and grabbing the steering wheel to make sure our Rambler stayed in its correct lane. Underneath my breath I was literally willing the few oncoming headlights to stay in their lanes. Consulting a map that night would have been impossible. Luckily, it was unnecessary. We had been on that drive innumerable times before and I knew it by heart. Even in the dark. Still, in my childhood years, I recall wondering if knowing such things by heart created a kind of inner map --- the kind that makes one react spontaneously when triggered. My imaginary wish or yearning, back then, was really for my parents to no longer suffer. It became a mantra born of the need to experience something else in our lives: “Let them die in peace so my brothers and I can live with a good family.” I used to feel so guilty for wanting this or for my parents to stop drinking altogether. My wishful thinking that I might be able to navigate my parents into wellness became a valiant but lost effort. Another twenty years would unfold before I would discover that this particular dilemma is often a shared one --- with other adult children of alcoholics.
I never did create the map that could heal my parents. But I did navigate one for myself. And for that, I am truly grateful.
No comments:
Post a Comment