Nothing Left but Love: A Story of Alzheimer's, Death and a Daughter's Healing Journey

By Glenda Rueger Payne

What youll find when you open this book. . .
There may come a time when you have to see a family member slowly progress through the ravages of illness and imminent death. Some of us may have the stressful and thankless responsibility of being a primary caregiver at the end of anothers life.
How would you do if faced with this role, especially if your family member was not someone who cared for you as you wanted to be nurtured and loved? What if during childhood that person caused you great pain? How loving could you really be? How forgiving? Could you be fully present for them during their time of pain and suffering?
This is the journey talented author Glenda Rueger Payne takes you on in her book, Nothing Left But Love. Glenda tells her powerful story through journal entries written during her mothers final days and reflections afterwards. We feel the sweetness of Glendas healing path to forgiveness.
She finds a way to give voice to those parts of herself that didnt have a voice as a child. She offers a unique and personal daughters perspective on the daily routine of the latter period of her mothers life as Alzheimers and congestive heart failure take over. Reflections of her mothers decline are interspersed with moments of pure humor.
I recommend this book to anyone looking for a sense of how to come to terms with the past, especially with a parent, while building resilience and self-empowerment.
Alina Frank
Best- selling author and
EFT-Matrix Reimprinting Trainer
www.alinafrank.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Feb 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504374514

Glenda Rueger Payne

Glenda Rueger Payne is a writer, intuitive visionary, energy healing practitioner and continuing student of life. Having dedicated her life to her personal healing journey, she most enjoys writing to inspire others as they wind their way through their own path to wholeness.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 Glenda Rueger Payne.

Interior Graphics/Art Credit: Michael Payne

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Copyright © North Central Florida Hospice, Inc._1996

Please note: These articles are being made publicly available in the hopes that they benefit others in the hospice community. Feel free to use them provided you credit Hospice of North Central Florida with sole authorship and do not alter the content.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-7418-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7419-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7451-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901666

Balboa Press rev. date: 02/03/2017

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Hospice Day

Chapter 2 The Unwanted One

Chapter 3 Becoming Mom’s Mom

Chapter 4 Where You Go, I Cannot Follow

Chapter 5 And We Laughed!

Chapter 6 Let It Flow like Water

Chapter 7 The Night Closes In

Chapter 8 Laugh as We Always Laughed

Chapter 9 Her Last Hurrah

Chapter 10 She Is Free

Epilogue

Resources

About the Author

This book is lovingly

dedicated to my mom, Wanda.

Thank you, Mom, for everything you gave me—even the hard lessons.

To my beautiful, wise sisters who traveled this journey with me.

To my nephew, my children by marriage, and grandchildren who will, no doubt, one day be facing parental caregiving themselves.

I hope by writing this book I’ve made the road a little easier for you.

And to my nieces, Kimberly Popejoy Muffley and Teri Popejoy Johnson, whose lovely mother, Dee, recently crossed over. She remains forever in my heart.

And lastly, to all of you who are currently facing this journey with your loved ones. May you be uplifted in your dark and lonely hours.

Foreword

M y nonno was already receding into the sidelines of Alzheimer’s disease when I began to visit my grandparents in their Washington, DC, apartment as a young adult. He’d had one or two violent outbursts and often didn’t recognize his family. But my nonna was determined to keep him at home.

Gradually, he no longer ambled to his chair in the living room, no longer joined her for meals at the dining room table. His life became confined to the bedroom, where he was tended by home health aides alongside my nonna. She told me, when I asked how she could bear it, that it was no longer like the love of a wife for a husband. It had become more like the love of a mother for a child.

My father, a marathon runner driven to Ivy League success and the first in his family to graduate high school, never imagined a life of disability. Just put a pillow over my head was the unsentimental way he envisioned calling it quits if he were to become terminally ill.

But when he was diagnosed—at a healthy sixty-three years old—with the worst kind of brain cancer, he wanted every possible day. That was despite being unable to speak, write, or walk the way he once had, and even when he could no longer leave his bed. To be read to, to eat the foods he loved, to be blanketed by their four cats—for this once proud and ambitious man, these pleasures of life became enough.

I approached an older couple I’d seen at several Death Cafés about facilitating at a future discussion session. The husband said, yes, they’d like to. But he needed me to know that his wife had Alzheimer’s, so they would have to do this as a team. I assured them that when I asked folks to sit with those they didn’t know—a standard Death Café practice—it wouldn’t apply to them. Well, actually, the husband said, speaking tenderly to his wife, every day you’re a new person to me, aren’t you? And I’m a new person to you. So it does apply to us, too.

These stories, like the one you hold in your hands, are prayer beads to be lingered over, to connect us to the big questions of our times: how to live, how to love, how to die, and how to forgive. Too often in contemporary North America, the sick and the old are assigned the status of other—no longer included at the heart of family and community life, their value expired. Nothing Left but Love is an important antidote to this thoroughly modern malady.

The story of Wanda Deane Baker Rueger and her daughters, told with unsparing honesty by Glenda Rueger Payne, is a story of redemption. This heartfelt book describes a relationship that continued and deepened during Wanda’s dying time and that did not end with her last exhale.

The changes in Wanda’s health—the progression of her Alzheimer’s and heart disease—were not just the end of something, the end of life (which strangely sounds better to the current sensibility than the word death). Instead, the unavoidable fact of Wanda’s mortality proved to be fertile ground in which healing and reconciliation were birthed.

So few of us grow up with our great aunt dying in the upstairs bedroom anymore. Nothing Left but Love brings us to the bedside that’s now so often hidden from view. Make no mistake: it’s not an easy place to be. As Glenda says, this journey was full of sadness and hardship. We are right there with Wanda as she loses control of her bladder. We’re spending sleepless nights with her daughters as they rotate through three unsatisfactory makeshift beds. And we’re enfolded in their loving care as they recount moments of sweetness to one another.

Fifteen years after my own father’s death, I often wish I’d kept a journal of the eighteen months in which I served as one of his two primary caregivers. At the time, it was all so vivid. I thought I would never forget. But the details of those days and all I might learn from reviewing them once more have inevitably faded.

The decision Glenda and her sisters made to document their time with their dying mother is a gift to us all. Love bigly—a phrase inadvertently coined in one of the last birthday cards Glenda wrote her mother—forms the core message of their story. It springs from these pages in the devotion of three daughters to their mother’s care. It poignantly underscores the healing that takes place as the author confronts the wounds in her family’s past. And it points to a chapter yet unwritten: the ways Wanda will live on.

These days, our self-help obsessed society has turned its fix-it mania on death. A good death is the new Holy Grail. A good death is generally understood as one in which the dying person doesn’t suffer, in which he or she imposes as little burden as possible on others.

Wanda’s death, presented to us with courage by Glenda, offers an alternative understanding of a good death: a death from which we can learn. Glenda turns Wanda’s dying and death into the kind of teacher our times so desperately need. This is a story to wonder about and to be troubled by, with the power to touch us and teach us.

Holly J. Pruett

Life-Cycle Celebrant Director of Death Talk Project

HollyPruettCelebrant.com

DeathTalkProject.com

Acknowledgments

S ometimes we never know the impact we have on those whose lives we touch. The people mentioned here helped me climb out of a deep depression caused by my medical condition. Without their support, I never would have put these words to the page.

Thank you for showing up in my life. Your gentle, compassionate encouragement coaxed me back into a rich and fulfilling life. With your help, I found the strength and deep will to reach for all of the goodness life offers.

To Dawson Church, PhD, director of EFT Universe. You are more than