Be the Candle

posted in: The Stories of Chicago IL | 0

By Diane Petersmarck, January 15, 2015

Emily Wharton said “There are two ways of spreading light. Be the candle or be the mirror that reflects it.”

Never one to be support staff, I want to be the candle.

When my Dad was diagnosed with dementia I began to study. I read everything I could lay my hands on about the disease and how to live with it. Dad lived three hours away from me but I tried to spend one long weekend a month there. I would try to use techniques I had learned. I would try to understand what was going on in his mind. I had moments of success – like the time we laid on his bed staring at the ceiling where he was seeing bugs and starting to get upset about it. I made a game of counting them and even named a few which got him to calm down. There were many more times when I was not successful however.

I learned to respect small victories. I learned to listen carefully. I learned how to enter his reality and try to see things the way he was seeing them. This is all much harder than it sounds and successes are totally overwhelmed by failures. But the victories are sweet and love is the best motivator – to use two platitudes in one sentence.