Is Being Stuck the Same as Finding Stillness?

The theme of my first poetry/writing class was Stillness. Finding stillness seems like a good idea in this whirlwind world. I often think it would do me some good to find a little stillness in my busy mind and can’t-sit-still body. I get the idea. But I went to a dark place with it, and all I could think about was being stuck. I had to ask, after reflecting on it for a couple hours, if being stuck was the same as finding stillness?

These last months I have been living ever more into the bittersweet of life, the tide carrying me along in a daze. My kids are growing – literally inches before my very eyes some days. And my mom keeps on beating the odds and crushing life. Except, in her case, I ask myself more and more often – why? She isn’t living the life she would have wanted. She wouldn’t recognize much about herself currently, though her loving heart, joyous spirit, and beautiful laugh remain in tact. I tell people all the time that since Alzheimer’s started affecting her she remembers what’s in her heart way more than what’s in her head. I’ve felt that to be true, and didn’t realize that Tennessee Williams is quoted as having said,

“Memory takes a lot of poetic license, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” – Tennessee Williams

It’s neat to think about memory living in the heart for someone who is severely cognitively impaired and doesn’t have a memory in the traditional way we think about it. It’s a gift that my mom has such a loving disposition because she doesn’t say much, certainly not much that makes sense. A lot of the time she has this far off look and I have to work to get her to focus on my face. So it’s not the most interactive relationship, and yet, she still exudes love, which is gratifying and heartwarming.

I wonder sometimes if her stillness in time is stuckness. The world keeps on whirring on by her and she remains essentially the sane and completely oblivious to it. I know I certainly feel stuck right smack dab in the middle of the sandwich even as the world keeps whooshing right on by. I heard someone on a podcast recently say that a sandwich is too generous a term, referring instead to this stage of life as more of a panini. Call it what lunch item you will, I’ve been in this for a very long time and this past summer I officially hit the summer of my discontent. Shakespeare may write about winters of discontent. I can tell you, no iambic pentameter involved, that this rainy ass summer stuck between kids launching and mom lingering, was discontenting. Probably not for the first time. Nor the last.

I’ve been caring for my mom for 10 years. TEN. During that time my kids went from babies to toddlers to teens. They are growing, launching, evolving. My role in her care, what it requires of me, and how I navigate it, have all changed and evolved during this time as well. And, sure, my mom has changed, too, but not in any good ways. She’s still alive, and she still gives love, but she also has no agency and isn’t part of her kids’ or grandkids’ lives. She is physically here and simultaneously absent. She’s the most present absent person I’ve ever met. She has missed it ALL even though she is literally, physically, right down the road. These last months I’ve just been stuck on the tragedy of that and the purgatory of this responsibility as well as my grief.

It’s the dawn of the summer of 2025, and I am just getting around to editing and posting this piece that I drafted in 2023. That tells you without any words required what life is like stuck in the sandwich! I recently read Mothers and Other Fictional Characters in which the author, Nicole Graev Lipson, shares the Portuguese word “saudade,” which translates roughly to “the presence of an absence, the ache that replaces what’s gone.” That’s such a perfect way of describing grief (I called it The Void in a previous post). It’s feeling the presence of the people we have loved who have departed this Earth fully. In my mom’s case, I actually live with the absence of who she was every day. Saudade.

Saudade – the presence of an absence, the ache that replaces what’s gone – page 20, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson

Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast talks a lot about grief, too much for me, to be honest, because I get it and I typically look to podcasts for an escape. But the title of the most recent one, Love is What Survives, struck me because that just makes sense. The pain we feel in loss is love with nowhere to go. I am grateful for having been so loved. And that helps move me forward and feels the slightest bit like the stuckness, for now, is melting.

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, especially the one we will never have.” –  Søren Kierkegaard

Ah, and if you made it this far, to answer my own question, no, I still cannot sit still so apparently being still and being stuck are not the same. In fact, sitting still would allow me to write more blog posts. Being stuck prevents me from doing so. Somehow being stuck gets in the way of the emotional and physical stillness of the mind required to create. Or that’s what I think anyway. Since I seem to be finding room to write again, it seems whatever blocked me mentally for the past two years has shifted. For now! Always, just for now. One day at a time.