An Impossible Situation Made Possible: on Who We May Truly Be, Part 2 in a Series
Updated: 6 days ago
Dust billows around the caravan, announcing its arrival across the desert. The sight: a montage of vintage buses, dilapidated trucks and cars piled high with trappings and treasures, devotees on foot with camels and donkeys in tow. A figure on foot emerges from the cloud, leading the procession. The guru and his entourage approach.
Under the sprawling tent, a crowd amasses, hungry for spectacle. I grab a stool for myself in the audience. A lion-maned man, neither young nor old, eyes other worldly, makes his appearance on the stage.
That stool was for me, he wordlessly communicates.
I know, I reply. I wanted you to know I was here.
Instead of sitting on the stool, he reclines into the air, hovering on the buoyancy of ancient wisdom.
Not to be outdone, I do the same.
A woman appears at his side, serene and loving, like his Mary Magdalene, her face obscured by green glow, her head crowned in a halo of… Wait, is that an intention map haloing her head, like the collage I make every New Year’s? My word, it is!
Suddenly we’re in their home: above the desert floor on a rocky outcropping, a loose collection of roofless “rooms” demarcated by rugs, cushions, ornate textiles, with mobiles and sumptuous fabrics blowing in the wind, all suffused in golden light. A six-foot strip of innumerable un-tumbled pink quartz crystals caught the sunlight. Though I’d never conceived of such a marvel, I had the understanding it was a healing bed. A giddy child floated more than ran about.
As if on cue, a hot flash yanks me from this lucid dream, ensuring I’ll remember it. I lay in bed, wide in wonder at this dreamtime encounter. Where had I been? Who were these mysterious elevated beings visiting me? Then a knowing hit me hard in the pit of my stomach, screeching to a halt the buoyancy I’d been riding.
That guru in the dream, he is my mother now... and his consort, that’s my father.
Nooooo!
I didn’t want to warrant this inconvenient knowing! I didn’t want to have to reconcile what felt like the glaring incongruity between these ascended masters and the caricatures I’d know as my parents through this lifetime. And I didn't want to have to step even further out of the victim-perpetrator-rescuer dynamic I still took some comfort in with them. Couldn't I just pass it off as a crazy dream from something I ate? Yet I had to acknowledge it: this dream was an answer to my prayers.
As backstory, I’ve been caring for both my aging parents 8 hours away and as an only child since January 2025 through their financial, medical, and cognitive crisis of such conspicuous proportions that it’s made surviving our son’s 2022 suicide seem—pardon my oversimplification—easier, when the challenge before me then seemed more simply rising to grieving well. Too, my relationship with my parents, especially my mother, is complicated. But their dual cognitive decline provides me opportunity for a sort of coming out: it's allowing me to risk publicly revealing the personality disorders, or rather dysregulation, I grew up in and break my polite silence before their bodily deaths. I'm mindful of the ethical breech here--I'm straying out of my circle into theirs and presuming to tell some of their story, not just my own--so I acknowledge this complication with my truth telling. But my motive is less about personal blaming and more about culturally normalizing the Walking Wounded who’ve raised so many of us, who pass on the generational trauma of our broken way of living, and who we often become in turn, until we’re resilient enough to break the cycle with inner work. Life with my parents has involved half a lifetime of recovery work and salvaging a workable relationship, only to find myself now trapped in what can feel like an impossible situation between old codependent caretaking patterns and new Power of Attorney caregiving liability. The injustice I've gotten myself into makes me want to scream! But there is nobody else to act as POA for them. So I’d like to keep sharing, as I’m able, how I’m coping with this impossible situation with my parents, now 20 months in, in the hope that when any of us humbly teach what we’re learning, our struggle may ripple out to help us all.
To help me cope with this impossible situation, I’d written a list on the back of my 2026 New Year’s intention map: “The Parent Project as Spiritual Practice.” Topping the list is the noble challenge to “remember who they (and we) truly are.” The only problem is… that can be really hard to do! About remembering, I’m speaking from the spiritual perspective: the possibility that none of us may be only as we appear here, in our temporary 3D primate-body incarnations and humbling, sometimes ridiculous ego-driven behaviors. Spiritual traditions across time and place, from indigenous to Christian, speak of this higher knowing that we’re timeless beings having a temporary human experience. It’s only that most of us are socialized to lose sight of this larger possibility in our modern Newtonian-physics, materialistic worldview, and to believe our existence is only what we can sanction with our five senses. But may there be more to our stories than we can presently see or understand? May quantum physics and public opinion indicate our collective consciousness is returning to this spiritual remembering? For those of us remembering, the challenge typically remains in applying lofty spiritual practice to messy human experience, myself very much included.
So how do I remember who my sometimes-abusive, now-demented mom may truly be? Especially as the dementia inflames the personality disorder, like throwing gasoline on a fire? How do I remember who she truly is when she’s raging at hospice for taking her husband away from her, for their emergency evacuating Dad off the floor, where he’s immediately fallen on her watch, within hours after she’s brought him home from rehab against medical advice, unable or unwilling to hear my or their insistence that Dad now needs 24/7 care, which her hubris insists she can singlehandedly provide as an 80-year-old retired nurse? Or when she's dramatically proclaiming she'll "never again be separated from my husband" after his months of hospitalization and rehab, only to sell him at the crossroads in a heartbeat once she learns her loyalty would entail leaving her house and stuff, so refusing--at the Nth hour!--to stay with him by moving to the nursing home's personal care wing, til death do they part? How do I remember who my wheelchair-confined, delusional, late-stage-Parkinsons dad truly is? Like when he’s defending Mom for accusing him of cheating, admitting like a Casanova that he actually has pursued many affairs since his emergency placement at the nursing home, but now has selflessly ended all of them, in valiant allegiance to her? This challenge of remembering who my parents truly are has seemed—and still seems—to me a spiritual brass ring given how they show up. But one of my favorite teachings is that it only takes our smallest willingness to allow the biggest shifts in perspective, that All That Is (or however we name the Un-Nameable) will take it from there.
I trust this dream came thanks to my smallest willingness, and I am grateful. It helps me to believe the dream gifted me a visual possibility of my parents' soul selves, helping me understand them in their actualized power, when I'm on the cusp of losing my mind as their human selves lose theirs.
So when the state trooper phones to report that my mom was overheard threatening Dad with killing herself unless he came home from the nursing home immediately, as if that’s within his control, but that she admitted at follow up she actually had no intention of harming herself, I am first and foremost livid. But with the dream's help, I can eventually find some compassion for her if I look at her desperate manipulation through the lens of a guru fallen from grace, accustomed to mastering his circumstances, but now disabused of his power, especially in reuniting with his helpmate. Or weeks later, when the same state trooper phones, this time to report Mom has been “no trespassed” from the nursing home after creating a scene, announcing this was the day she was finally taking Dad home (presumably on the free community elder bus she arrived on?), that this wasn’t a prison, apparently even somehow flipping a table with her petite frame, most of me is gutted. But with the dream's help, part of me can understand--even applaud--how this over-the-top performance may be thanks to Mom's enduring soul-self showman. Or weeks before, with my dad on the phone, waxing nonsensical about his latest Ponzi scheme ensnarement, he suddenly broke character and lucidly clarified, “The ending doesn't necessarily represent how things truly are.” In retrospect I wonder if I was hearing the prophetic wisdom of his green-faced, collage-haloed soul self tearing through the dimensional fabric to have her say.
I remember reading the perspective that those choosing to incarnate with a personality disorder may be choosing the most difficult human path, even more so than physical disability. Those of us suffering physically or bearing deep wounds from those with personality disorder behaviors may disagree. But, like my dream, this possibility helps me regain compassion for my parents, for perhaps choosing such hard paths, and for myself for perhaps choosing them as catalysts.
I don’t know where this Parent Project will lead or how it will resolve. I'm listening for discernment between what hard experiences their soul selves may have contracted for vs what protections I as their daughter and POA may wish for. Though Dad is stable in nursing home care and waiting on his Medicaid app to pass, Mom is still refusing to leave home. Dad describes having to be apart from her as "terrible," despite how abusive she can be also to him. More for his sake than hers, I've hired an aid to chaperone their brief weekly visit, with the meager funds left for Mom's care: their only means of still being together. Maybe to help her cope, Mom's begun hallucinating Dad's actually home with her. If she can't find him, she's begun wandering the neighborhood, looking. But since she's still finding her way back, and showering, she's not yet eligible for Adult Protective Services intervention. On this theme of my parents yearning to be together, and Mom's backfiring attempts at reuniting them, my heart is breaking. Mom's latest prison break on Dad's behalf may mean that after 62 years of seldom being separated, my parents will never again live under the same roof. I will try to stay neutral. I want to allow them to go through the processes they may need to, even in their dotage, and still remain ethical, even without regrets, as I'm parenting my parents.
I do know I'm humbled by the time & psychic energy my parents' elder care is asking of me, even at a distance, and even with the healthier boundaries I've set. So my respect goes all the more to those doing elder care up close, especially if relationships with loved ones are as riddled as mine. I'm worn out by all the interventions I've staged to help but that Mom has thwarted. I'm grieving the doting daughter I could have been in very different circumstances. I luxuriated in a two-week respite when I wrote this, between fires. I'd rested up, tended my own health, and finally gotten to projects I've meant to... like the laundry basket of no-skid mats for the downstairs rugs that've sat beside the blue chair for the past FIVE years... through son suicide, historic hurricane, and parent crisis successive initiations. Then Mom's spending going off the rails yanked me back to the Parent Project, and back to not liking who it can turn me into. Navigating this much mess and pain the last few years, I trust it opens my capacity to help others navigate theirs, with knowing and compassion.
I'll keep superimposing in my mind's eye my parents' soul selves over their human selves when we FaceTime Fridays during their weekly visit at the nursing home. As my teacher suggested, I'l keep experimenting with talking to them as if from my soul self to their soul selves, regardless of dementia. I can hold both versions of us as true, at the same time. I'll keep greeting their challenges, sometimes in my human messiness, sometimes skillfully as spiritual practice, sometimes as both, at the same time. And I'll keep remembering, in my dream, that when the guru reclined into the air, I did too.
I welcome your sharing, in the comments below or in contacting me, what my sharing brings up for you, especially if you're likewise in the throes of eldercare, receiving lucid dreams, or allowing the smallest willingness, maybe about who you--or any of us--may truly be.
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