Poetry As a Means to Negotiate Alzheimer's and Other Dementia Related Diseases

Book Assessment:

Kakugawa, Frances H. Breaking the Silence: A Caregiver's Voice. Nevada City, California: Willow Valley Press, 2010.

Regardless of striking achievements of science and technologies, the troubles of human life and destiny have not ended, nor have the options been genuinely impacted by scientific information. Alzheimer's illness, which at present impacts around 10% of men and women more than 65 years of age and 50% of these more than 85 years of age, has no remedy. As quite a few as 5.three million Americans are now living with the devastating illness. According to a Read, unless new therapies are created to lower the likelihood of Alzheimer's illness, the quantity of men and women with Alzheimer's illness in the USA may perhaps rise to 14 million by the end of the year 2050.

Study against this background, Frances Kakugawa's book, a mix of poetry, story and sensible guide, is a recognition of the solutions rendered by experienced and voluntary organizations that seek to lessen the pangs of Alzheimer's sufferers as properly as the sufferings of their close to and dear ones. It pays tribute to caregivers who have been untiringly functioning for creation of a planet without the need of dementia, stroke, or cancer just as it seeks to assistance them suffer the innumerable crises of caregiving.

Breaking the Silence: A Caregiver's Voice merges Frances Kakugawa and her poet-colleagues' varied experiences with a broad human point of view, engaging each thoughts and heart. The caregivers seek to share their compassionate spirit with a sense of gratitude to all these who enable the victims of Alzheimer's illness negotiate their mentally vacant existence. They are not only conscious of the sufferers' substantial loss of brain cells or progressive decline in their capability to feel, bear in mind, purpose, and picture, or their language issues and unpredictable behavior, confusion, or loss of sensory processing, but they also know effectively how the Alzheimer's victims suffer a sort of living death, being a mere physique stripped of its humanity. They have been witness to caregiving loved ones members of increasingly confused and helpless sufferers themselves generally being the illness's exasperated and exhausted victims:

" Is she the mom who nurtured me?
Is it the dementia playing havoc with my thoughts?
Or is this seriously my mom? I never know."

('Far more Glimpses of a Daughter and Mother')

and

"I am torn involving two needy factions.
Mom unaware, daughter pushing all boundaries
Each out of handle."

('The Sandwich')

For Frances Kakugawa, caregiving is a mission even as the memory and image of her Alzheimer's struck mother persists in her life as a "loud presence". She offers voice to a lot of caregivers who are ever worried around their family members not even able to carry out the simplest tasks and/or are absolutely dependent on other folks for their care. She expresses the pretty haunting worry of death:

"Is she breathing? Is she alive?
Is she lastly gone, freeing me as soon as again?
I continue my sentinel watch."

('Unspoken Mornings')

Frances not only articulates their worry but also learns to negotiate it by boldly facing it as component of life. In fact, she turns the metaphor of death as integral to life, be it in the form of "an ache of emptiness", "unfulfilled dreams", or "unlived moments". In her deeper silences, she explores the quite which means of life:

"A second gust of wind
Lifts yet another fistful of ashes.
Be nonetheless and listen."

('Song of the Wind')

It is hearing the inner silence, which is one thing meditative, Biblical, and spiritual. It is awaking to the self, the Holy Spirit, the Divine himself. Once the soul peaks into silence, human becomes divine. She sounds earnest and exceptional, searching for harmony with the highest ideals, irrespective of chaotic individual experiences. As Setsuko Yoshida says in 'Can I?':

"Poems by Frances this morning
Reveal the feelings of 'divine'
In caregiving."

In fact, as females poets, Frances Kakugawa and her caregiver colleagues (Elaine Okazaki, Linda McCall Nagata, Eugene Mitchell, and other folks) gift a feminine and but really humane point of view to the dementia-connected illnesses. Jason Y. Kimura, Rod Masumoto, and Red Silver, though male poets, demonstrate the 'Prakriti' or 'Yin' elements in rhythm with other contributing caregivers' sensibility. They variously turn the Alzheimer's into a metaphor for the loss of language, the loss of memory, and the loss of voice. Their poetry, usually short and individual, and wealthy and insightful, becomes a suggests to communicate the sufferers' loss of feeling, love, dignity, honor, name, and connection; in brief, their isolation, or threat to living itself:

"All my life I have lived
With crayons in one hand,
Filling in spaces,
Spaces left by departed lovers, loved ones, mates,
Leaving me crayons smashed against walls
Building additional grief than art."

('Empty Spaces')

They also use the metaphor for challenge to survive, to exist, devoid of fears and anxieties:

"I am lady,
Suppressed,
Dying."

('Nissei Lady')

and

"I am not merely heaven, man and earth
Rooted by cultural hands.
Sift these sands. Yes!
I am free!
I am tossed into the winds.
I shed my kimonos.
I spread my legs.
I am free."

('Lesson #three')

and

"After I am 88
I will nevertheless be lady,
Yes!"

('After I am 88')

and

"I am nevertheless right here
Assist me stay a human becoming
In this shell of a lady I have become.
In my planet of silence, I am nonetheless right here.
Oh, I am nonetheless right here."

('Emily Dickinson, I am Somebody')

They convert the Alzheimer's into a search for reprogramming the thoughts, the thought, and the attitude to overcome the irreversible suffering and helplessness. As Frances quite feelingly asserts: it is the search for

"...the very same umbilical cord
That as soon as set me free
Now pulls and tugs me back
To exactly where I had begun.
There ought to be hidden
Someplace a present really divine
In this journey back."

('Mother Into Youngster, Kid Into Mother')

They are correct to themselves as they voice their search for the complete. With an empathetic awareness, they disclose their innate goodness, trust, and compassion to create a "symphony of fact." At the core of their musing lies a need to integrate themselves, to live in time as nicely as in eternity:

"What other path is there
Except the divine
Exactly where love, kindness, compassion,
Assistance me uncover small pieces of myself
That create me smile
Bring me such quiet joy
At the end of both day."

('Bless the Divine')

They reveal the functioning of the primal impulses of the human soul which rises above the variations of race and of geographical position. In brief, they give vent to the thought of all individuals in all lands.

As poet-caregivers they cope with their tensions, fears and anxieties by means of introspection, and accommodate their inner and outer conflicts, sufferings and celebrations by means of imaginative insight. They mirror the broad social or familial circumstances as properly as their personal private state with perceptions that are typically diverse from these of the male poets (or male caregivers). Their quest is for real fact vis-à-vis degeneration, privation, insecurity, helplessness, anonymity, and death. They search for life and live with awareness of what lies beneath the skin of factors about, the psycho-spiritual strains, the moral dilemmas, the betrayals, and the paradoxes:

"Why do you say I am sacrificing
Good years of my life
For caring for my mother,
After it should not be a secret
That I am definitely living
In a way I have do not lived ahead of?
...
No, this is not sacrifice.
It is just truth.
I am genuinely living
In a way I have don't lived just before.
I am living love."

('What I Know')

Against the complexities of experiences, they demonstrate a sense of values such as love, faith, reality, tolerance, patience, peace, charity, harmony, humility, and healthier relationships. They have a tendency to believe intuitively and/or turn individual, inward, spiritward, or Godward, with out indulging in intellectual abstraction. They create with poetic sensibility. Their metaphors and pictures reflect their inner landscape as a lot as their responses to what they observe or experience externally. They are generally reticent and sincere in their verbal expression, and their inner vibrations touch or elevate the readers' senses. As they create discourse of themselves as caregivers, they also sound committed to their residence, family members, kids, motherhood, and neighborhood, normally voicing their personal vision and information which cuts across cultures and regions.

They seek to transcend their physique or femininity and respect the lady in themselves, even if impacted by the Alzheimer's atmosphere. They turn inside out and reveal what is private however universal in their diverse roles as mother, wife, daughter, and think the agony of the spirit even though attempting to know "Who I am?", or "How I need to live, who I need to be", or "What am I searching for? Why did I come?"

As they appear back or reflect their gift, they also voice the want for robust sense of togetherness vis-à-vis their inner conflicts, spiritual hunger, loneliness, or dependence. They sound difficult the Alzheimer's itself:

"You may perhaps not rob us, though we forgot.
You may well not erase us, though we may not create.
You may perhaps not silence, though we may perhaps not speak.
The stories, the laughter, the moments that passed
Into their retain, you might not steal
Into a evening of silence."

('Hey Alzheimer's')

As they fill one with hope for ageing with grace and dignity Regardless of the difficulties of loss, they create an option motive and impulse for social action at a quite private level:

"Via this deepest darkened evening
I will retain the light
To take away all your fears.
Just know I will usually be close to."

('To My Mother')

There is an urge for altering the scenario for themselves, or for becoming in peace with oneself. The poets and caregivers of Breaking the Silence seek to create a new culture as they rationalize how we have to live in future.