Missing Pieces

navigating diminishment

When you picture yourself at your best, the way you most like to be known, how do you look? What age are you? What accumulations of traits and activities has defined your best self throughout the years?

One of the things we have to deal with when life is winding down is the sense of diminishment. Whether a CCD (chronic complex disease) is slowly eroding the fullness of who you are, or whether you are noticing the predictable shrinkage that accompanies aging, you can’t help but feel a continuing sense of becoming…less.

Every year I lose more of myself! my good friend Heidi declared when we were talking last week. Every fall before winter arrives I know that by spring I won’t be the same person when I go out to play in the yard again!

Intellectually of course we all know that we are always changing, growing and then, beginning earlier than we’d like to, declining. But we can get away with not thinking about this until a disease process claims us, or we cross over into the upper decades of a normal lifespan. Suddenly we can no longer walk around the block, or kneel down to do our gardening, or go to an evening concert or show. Maybe we can no longer read, or climb ladders, or do any number of things we used to once love. Parts of the life we enjoyed break off and float away in the breeze.

It’s hard to lose pieces of yourself, little by little. It’s okay to go ahead and say that out loud. It’s very hard.

And the hardest part is losing the things we have loved best about ourselves. That other stuff - the shame, the regret, the poor choices - all that is easy to relinquish. But the things we are proud of, the things we have claimed as gifts, the the things we do well and are well known for, the fullness of life - we want to hold on to all this for dear life. Who would we be without it all? How do we live out the days in it’s vacuum?

I don’t really know. I’m just pondering these things along with you.

When I looked like this, I was at the peak of my life. In my mid years, healthy, happy, productive. I really liked myself then. I could’ve stayed that way a long time. But time is mobile, fluid, impermanent. I had no idea then what a CCD was, let alone that I would develop one soon.

When I listen to your stories, I hear similar songs of lament. Some of you have joints going bad. Some are is losing eyesight, another one teeth. Some experience heart dysfunction, some dementia. And here comes functional disease along for the ride - cancer, diabetes, arthritis.

Someone once said, We crawl through the first phases of life anticipating growth, and then we crest the hill and begin our return to earth. (I apologize for not having the source.)

I don’t remember anybody telling me the slide back down the hill was going to be quite so uncomfortable, bouncing along over every boulder on our backsides the way we are.

My intention for writing here in this space has always been to offer solace and sustenance as life is winding down. Sometimes I have none of that to offer. I don’t have any magic answers for navigating diminishment. I learn from each of you as I listen to your stories, and I treasure the relationships that we have, and the openness we have embraced.

But I can offer companionship. Maybe that’s the best solace of all, the thing that can buoy us up and wrap us in some measure of comfort - that we have each other all along the way.

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Please feel free to share your stories or strategies for managing diminishment here in this space (and a current picture of you if you wish), or by private message to me.