The following is an excerpt from Caregiving: The Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss and Renewal, by Beth Witrogen MacLeod; it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and awarded five stars by readers at Amazon.co.uk. You can purchase your own copy from Amazon by clicking the book's cover on the left side of this page, or visit the author's website by clicking here. AWAKENING THE HEART From Chapter 14 Every day gives abundant opportunity to decide whether to be a victim or to embrace the world. We all suffer one way or another, yet the fires of hell can ignite the heart. And once love is sparked, although its constancy may ebb and flow, it can never die. It is an awful grace that opens our hearts: Compassion lives in the here and now, and faces outward. Grief has become initiator and guide, transforming from a numbing weakness into the basis of spiritual expression. "In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy," says Brother David Steindl-Rast. Here are stories that reveal the power of unconditional love to widen the path and light the way. Forgiveness Twelve years ago, after her father passed away, Linda became the primary caregiver for her eighty-six-year-old mother, Marie, who left her home of seventy years to travel two thousand miles west. Despite a history of poor relations, Linda cared for her needs out of duty, but she never felt a bond. Her mother had a history of mental illness and was abusive to Linda as a child. But when Marie was diagnosed with dementia, Linda, fifty-six, decided to mend whatever tears in their relationship she could, and do it with love so she could devote herself to caring in a compassionate way. For a time she was an emotional wreck, but Linda found a therapist, talked with others about similar experiences, kept searching until she found answers. She is at peace for the first time in her relationship with Marie, willing to set aside the baggage of so many years and forgive the past. We are all so fragile and so sensitive to the conditions around us ... what else can we do but make our world so small when we are in pain. But allowing the pain to get big enough, then one can reach out and touch a ray of hope from someone, from a book, another caregiver, a group. Caregiving is a temporary stage in a relationship which will take you to a level of compassion that you have never before experienced. Its not the disease its the level of giving that changes your life. Finding equanimity Film editor Deborah Hoffmann, fifty, wrestled at length with an inability to accept the changes that dementia brought to her mother. A graduate of Columbia School of Social Work and married fifty years to Banesh Hoffmann, a colleague of Albert Einstein, Doris was a proud intellectual. When she was diagnosed at age eighty-four with an incurable disease of the mind, even though she had been having memory problems for fifteen years, it was an incredible blow. This was not Deborah's image of her mother; it was beneath her. Deborah says the first time Doris asked how they were related, it knocked her breath away. Then there was the first time she asked if Deborah had been to New York, where she had lived for twenty-five years. And when had she first met Banesh? After enough times, however, Deborah wasn't upset anymore. And since the confusion didn't upset Doris, they took it in stride. At a certain point Deborah stopped correcting, stopped insisting on reality being important, and that made it easier on her mother. And it liberated Deborah just to let it go by. It wasn't a big deal if it wasn't really April, or they weren't really sorority sisters. Doris still thought Deborah was someone she cared a lot about and was happy to be with. It no longer even mattered that her daughter was gay; it was simply that she had a friend who made her happy, whom Doris also enjoyed. And then came Deborahs awakening: Holding onto roles and images had been the root of her suffering. Deborah oversaw her mother's well-being for about five years, but as the situation unraveled it became more difficult, and ultimately impossible, to let her live alone. She hired some home care for about a year, for four hours a day, then six, eight, twelve but Doris wasn't willing to let anyone stay in the apartment overnight. Then it just wasn't safe anymore, so Deborah found a good residential care facility close by. All of the literature, the personal stories about Alzheimer's, they all refer to the devastation. And I agree. But they also refer to a person's loss of humanity, and I just don't agree. Even though my mother has very little recollection of the past, I don't believe that translates into a loss of humanity. It is shocking to us who rely on memories of the past, but she is truly, truly living in the moment, the ultimate enlightened person. I sense her spirit and her personality very much there. Sometimes someone will be sitting next to her, worse off than her, no verbal ability left, and my mother, who had never been particularly affectionate, is holding her hand, stroking her hair and face. How could you possibly say that's a person with no humanity? We have to separate out what we're going through, and what the person we're caring for is going through. Im very attached to my childhood memories; they tell me who I am. But its clear to me you can still be somebody without it; you still have definition without a past. What is most difficult for people is they are no longer linked to the past the way you are, and so theyre not linked to you in the way you want them to be and the way youre linked to them. I would be thrilled if she remembered that I'm her daughter, but it's not a loss to her. It's a loss to me. "In undertaking a spiritual life," writes Jack Kornfield, "what matters is simple: We must make certain that our path is connected with our heart." Then, with undivided intent, whatever we encounter is our spiritual practice. In Buddhist lore the bodhisattva, having become enlightened, is the epitome of compassion, the awakened one who has turned from self-absorption to helping others. It is not that he does not suffer he does, but his engagement in the world is voluntary. He is joyful because he lives in the present, mindful of all of life. No longer at the mercy of convention, no longer drawn to the goods of this world or living in terror over mankind's condition, he is one with all that is, though not attached to it. Transcending desire, he has become liberated. Compassion is spirit made flesh. © 1999 Beth Witrogen McLeod. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author. From Caregiving: The Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss and Renewal, John Wiley & Sons, 1999. From Chapter 14.