Gestalt

This past weekend I gestalted Jeff’s passing, and our goodbye which, in reality, did not occur. Well yes, the passing really occurred, but not a two-way goodbye with acknowledgement of the significance the past 10 years (not to mention the past lifetime) held for the parties involved. Such is the nature of Alzheimer’s though. A person is lost long before he is finally lost.

I don’t think gestalt is really a verb. But Gestalt therapy is really a concept, and the particular warm and humane version practiced by Mariah Fenton Gladis and her team of therapists and apprentices at The Pennsylvania Gestalt Center’s weekend workshops is really a process in which a person can take part. And I did.

A cluster of people spend the weekend together (we were at capacity, with 40 or so participants,) and engage in discussions and exercises. The greatest part of the weekend, by weight and volume, is devoted to “hot seat” work, in which a person, for 30 minutes more or less, confronts through some imaginative form of re-creation, an aspect of his/her life that is in need of looking at. 

There are parent issues, regretted decision issues, difficult relationship issues. You can imagine. People usually like the opportunity to take roles in other folks work, and that is usually how the process is carried out--through surrogates, standing in for whatever or whomever needs to appear...sometimes maybe even a person having a heart to heart with self. 

I knew, or at least I assumed, that once I started talking during my turn, I’d have to pick someone to be Jeff. I had, for that reason, already zeroed in on someone I’d met, (who, for confidentiality reasons, I will call Hank) and he did a fine job. It was me I was more concerned about, performance-wise, even though performance isn’t really an apt word in this context. Really I just wondered whether I had the capacity to drop my intellectual, detached observer of the process stance sufficiently that I could even experience anything psychologically or emotionally meaningful.

I need not have wondered. Mariah has some well-honed insight into humans, and great intuition when it comes to setting up the right evocative scenario. By the time she had me sitting by Jeff-as-played-by-Hank’s deathbed with my head on his chest and arm around his torso, and he acknowledged the care and love and work I’d tendered over the past decade, and expressed his desire that I move on and have a life (things which I knew to be true of Jeff,) I couldn’t not have a cathartic, moving experience. 

I do not, at this time, know just what I took home from the weekend. I liked it. I will be processing the loss of Jeff in whatever private way my psyche sees fit to employ for quite a while, I imagine. I’m not sure what role my Gestalt work will have played. Several people told me I looked much more relaxed that afternoon, and the next day, than I had prior to my turn. But maybe I was just anticipating being brave enough to jump up and take that turn, and relaxed after. I don’t know. Didn’t, still don’t.

I think I’d do it again though

marbles

Life is a little like a bucket of marbles. Just try to shift them around because you’d like to make a little more space in the middle, or maybe you want all the cat eyes on the top. Good luck. If there’s a hole, it’ll soon be filled by tumbling entropy, and the marbles will mix themselves up any way they want to. 

In the midst of saddest events in life, there is absurdity. Don’t pretend it’s not there, in the interest of preserving the dignity of the moment. At least admit it to yourself. You don’t necessarily have to confess in writing like this: 

Jeff had died. I was alone with him. I’d said goodbye, into ears that may have heard, and he passed peacefully. A little while later, Helen, Gordon, Bill, and Allen had returned to the scene. At the bidding of the hospice nurse, the funeral home team arrived. A young lady and a young man, each on the stout side and about five feet tall, with at most an extra inch or two between them. Clad in black suits, they wore studied expressions of somber compassion, and spoke in gentle whispery tones.

They readied the gurney, then took their positions, one at the head, one at the foot. It was at this point, Allen told me later, that he and Bill looked at each other with the shared thought--should we be helping them? But the “funeral gnomes” (another thought, shared with me later,) carried out their offices unflappably while I was engaged in a phone call with the pastor, to start planning a service. There is no one who would have found the scenario more quirkily funny than Jeff. 

My old dog, Freddi, died four days after Jeff. Her care needs had intensified in her last year. I was plying her with tasty canned stews, concocted for doggies, and carrying her outside and in to meet the calls of nature. By some ways of reasoning, I should be experiencing a reprieve from dog duty. In fact, I am sitting here now, typing away, while Olivia’s chihuahua (snuggled against my right thigh) passes tiny gassy poots, and Allen’s cockapoo (snuggled against my left) snores. There isn’t much of a dog-shaped cavity in my bucket of marbles.