Grief and Rebirth: The Dilemma of the Alzheimer’s Sufferer and the Alzheimer’s Survivor by Wally Swist

We therefore apprehend . . . this perpetual renaissance within us, in every internal act, of a Being we always recognise, whose very essence is to be eternally reborn.

— Louis Lavelle, De l’Acte, Chapter VII, trans. Robert Alan Jones

Through experiences of outward observation and of looking within, I’ve come to understand that grief, or at least aspects of it, is sublime. What is sublime can be defined as exalted, noble, lofty. What comes to mind for me is an image of a great light emanating from parted clouds above, as I stand beneath it with my hands raised, palms upward, in a stance of receiving grace. Grace is different from grief, but not so different from humility. Grief presses itself on us in ways that precipitate nothing but humility. Through humility, which is a kind of active gratitude, we experience what is sublime.

After my partner Tevis was recently admitted to an all-Alzheimer’s care facility, I came to know poignant levels of grief while I was packing her things to be moved to the care facility. Whenever I walk into her room, after cleaning and straightening what is left in it, I do feel relief that she is being cared for in ways that, after many years of my caregiving, I couldn’t do for her anymore. But having her gone from our home brings inexpressible sorrow. Now, sorrow is different from grief, but they are similar. Sorrow underlies grief. Grief is the garment that we wear, while sorrow is the stitching and sewing of the garment.

It is our actions that matter in all of this. In reading my longtime friend and colleague Robert Alan Jones’s new translation of Louis Lavelle’s (1883–1951) De l’Acte, I find that once again the French philosopher has given me a “staging area” for thoughts regarding Tevis’s suffering, her lamentation, how caregiving could become a vehicle for spiritual practice, and just where the disease of Alzheimer’s—a disease like none other—leaves both sufferer and survivor.

I am aware of grief attached to me as if it were either an albatross or a grail, or both. I am aware of Tevis’s suffering as if she were bearing Christ’s cross, so unrelenting is it. Her medications can mitigate the suffering, and rest can sometimes restore me. But we have been forced to become different people because of Alzheimer’s: Tevis being the sufferer, me being the survivor—although both of us continue to suffer, since there is no placating the destruction the disease lays waste to the brain and to one’s human condition.

In the essay that follows, I have interspersed quoted material from Lavalle’s text (in italics) with my own reflections and interpretations. It is my hope that each informs and illuminates the other, to draw a more complete portrait of my experience of caregiving.

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The secret of the world, the principle of all intelligibility and joy, consists in the admirable and eternal circuit through which the pure act is given in participation to all beings so they may consent to make it living within them. It asks us to take it as an end purely so that it can become the source of ourselves. The ideal toward which our élan tends ahead of us is the very ideal to which this élan is attached behind us. The analysis of participation suffices to show that the peculiarity of the act is to be a circle that closes on itself, in which the total being is continually offered for participation precisely to receive into itself all those beings who give themselves being by putting into play a possibility it has proposed to them. Yet up to the very end they retain the freedom not to realise it. It is this eternal circle that makes the universe a vast wheel continually advancing through time if we consider the career of all creatures, which always turns on itself if we consider the movement that animates the whole.

In experiencing the sublimity of grief, our “élan,” our enthusiasm and energy, precipitates our participation in “the universe” as “a vast wheel continually advancing through time, which turns on itself.” Of course, we do not need to experience the sublime or even grief to take part in this. However, through the sublimity of grief we become swept up in this “vast wheel . . . that animates the whole.” Whether we intended it or not, there comes a recognition of that “Being” within “whose very essence is to be eternally reborn.”

Alzheimer’s sufferers caught in the plight of a progressively debilitating disease, and caregivers and survivors whose grief is palatable as they practice active gratitude (which puts them on the path to humility, which then opens out to the sublime), may not perceive a breakthrough, yet may very well find themselves reborn through grief itself. This may look and feel something like what the Spanish Nobel laureate Juan Ramón elliptically described in his poem “Mares” (“Seas”): “Nothing happens? Or is it that everything has happened, and are we settling, quietly, in the new life.”

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But there is no privileged instant in time, any more than there is a privileged location in space: to select the most remote instant with the aim of according it metaphysical primacy would make no more sense than to select the most distant place for the same reason. In every place, in every instant, we have a revelation of the first term, provided we contemplate within it the act that produces it and not its limiting conditions, i.e. the other terms upon which it depends. We therefore must be able to start from anywhere, and the philosopher who seeks the first term holds it in his hands as soon as he begins this search, or as soon as he poses this question.

In that sense, the first term can be engaged at each point and at each instant, since the act is always present everywhere. To show that it is alien to objectivity, i.e., time and space, we could also say that it is nowhere and never yet that it is the condition of what is always and everywhere produced, and that it is never an object that supposes another object on which it depends. On the contrary, we cannot mount back beyond the act and it is absurd to imagine, for example, another act by which it could be determined. And for that reason each point and each instant offer the individual a vantage-point that embraces the totality of the world.

In the beginning of “Mares,” Jiménez writes (in my own translation):

I sense that my boat
has foundered, there at the bottom,
against something immense.
And nothing
happens! Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

The practice of presence is one of perseverance. I recall seeing an advertisement for a health practitioner. It was clear to me that was different from others I had seen before, and this was because the practitioner stated that she had had a spiritual awakening yet admitted that her life was still far from idyllic, and that she needed to be present to others through pain. Her practice could be healing in that it augured presence through what was uncomfortable and even unbearable; it was the shared experience of pain that made her practice so beneficial, so nourishing. Lavelle describes the practice of presence this way by relating it to “the instant,” a moment in time, inherent in “the act”:

The instant always brings us a presence; and we plainly see that presence is an act and not a fact: there is for us no other presence than that we give ourselves. Where presence is lacking, being is lacking, the Absolute Being as well as the participated being; and absence is again a mental or ideal presence. The act as act always creates presence, which is the very character of being: and this presence does not change; what changes are its modes, i.e., transitory perspectives on being, none of which suffices because all are finite and imperfect. I have to make an effort to show that for me things are absent: it is moreover necessary that I represent them to myself. Thus, reflection discerns nothing but different forms of presence: it compels me constantly to pass from one to another. But in creating time, reflection also overcomes it, for it contrasts the various moments in which the aspects of becoming succeed one another with an identical presence in which reflection is reinstated each time it acts.

The practice of presence is necessary in persevering through our most difficult times, through the hours and days of our grief, whether as an Alzheimer’s sufferer or a survivor. It offers us the humility to withstand the washing of the seas of time over and around us. It is an experience of immensity that is more than just a sense of magnitude. Magnitude is a word often associated with experiences the depths of love and loving, but this magnitude is one of sprawling vistas seemingly without parameters. It is a Dantean sense of grief and sorrow, an intimation only of his images in the Inferno or Purgatorio. We, if anything, when grieving and/or feeling sorrow, experience time. Lavelle addresses this, positing that “Being is indistinct from time”:

Time itself is void and without action; it can only express the law according to which the world is constantly becoming. One can say that the consciousness we have of it—which is one with its reality—expresses the rapport between our passivity and our activity. When our activity is at a minimum, though not completely abolished, as in waiting, Being is indistinct from time. In the measure that objects come to fill it, they claim more and more of our attention and time, so to speak, recedes. Only, as they impose themselves on us, it is necessary to detach them from us and from each other, which obliges us to order them consecutively. This succession itself is abolished in the measure that our activity grows. In the perfection of the act, time not only ceases to be felt but ceases to be. We will be able recover it in the effects or traces the act leaves behind, so to speak, which is only possible when our activity begins to flag again. Moreover, only will’s effects enter time, not its operation. Only intellectual research has need of time, not the act of thinking that contemplates truth nor indeed its intelligible object: each time thinking is exercised it sets out anew: it is always an origin, never a sequel. Just as the tribulations of love have a history but not the act of loving, which abolishes the succession of instants―not in appearance but in reality. That is to say that, along with the appearance, the act abolishes time itself, which is only an appearance or, rather, the condition for the possibility of all appearances.

If we assent to what Lavelle portrays as “the act abolish[ing] time itself,” and “a Being we always recognise, whose very essence is to be eternally reborn,” then the possibility of our living in an eternal instant or moment of time is not only less capricious than we might has suspected; it is as close as we can get to a sure thing.

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In its echoes of Meister Eckhart, the phrase “a Being we always recognise” represents what is so vital about Lavelle’s Christian mystical philosophy. This mystical understanding of “Being” that “creates itself eternally” is something to steer by. It reinvigorates us even in the maws of grief, a natural healing process that can perpetuate itself in Alzheimer’s sufferers and survivors. Trying to represent what it is like to be a caregiver of an Alzheimer’s sufferer is nearly impossible, since the disease morphs and changes direction not only day to day but often hour to hour, with infinite triggers that abound. Out of the goodness of the act of caregiving, we can eventually discover the “value of what we affirm and what we do,” as Lavelle explicates:

When one tries to penetrate deeply into the nature of the Absolute Act, one realises that it is an act that wills itself eternally. And just as we are, as subject or I, only then, when we will ourselves to be, one also finds that there must be within the pure act a self-will through which self-causation receives its true meaning and becomes no longer a logical necessity but a creative exigency whose root is indivisibly metaphysical and moral. Thus, the ancients sought in the good the essence of and very reason for Being. Being creates itself eternally, purely owing to the affirmation that being is worth more, and infinitely more, than nothingness: in creating itself it justifies itself; it creates, so to speak, its own raison d’être. And for us, every raison d’être resides in the value of what we affirm and what we do.

One can intuit Lavelle suggesting the philosophy of Descartes to illustrate what he calls “supreme raison d’être.” It reads as a parallel to the famous formulation “I think, therefore I am”; in other words, “If a reason for being exists, then that therefore is why I exist.” This specific argument that Lavelle offers is reminiscent of a short poem regarding perfection by St. John of the Cross, entitled “Suma de Perfeccion” (“Sum of Perfection”). Here are some lines, again in my own translation:

To ignore the created and inferior,
to always remember the creator,
to give full attention to the interior,
and be open to the Beloved Lover.

In this similar sense of “perfection,” or striving to connote it, Lavelle writes:

It is remarkable that Descartes saw very deeply that the power of being self-caused is always associated with perfection, i.e., with the possibility of being self-sufficient. This is the supreme quality of the Sage. Now, that supreme efficacy, which is foremost an efficacy with respect to self, can be expressed in two ways: first negatively, in terms of magnitude, since a power outside of which there is nothing else must engender itself eternally; then positively, in terms of value, since this efficacy prevails only because it creates its own supreme raison d’être.

Even in the case of grief and rebirth through such a devastating disease as Alzheimer’s, we can lift our eyes up, stand with our hands held beside us, palms up, in awe of a light emanating above us, a kind of experience of the sublime, borne out of our grief and sorrow to experience a rebirth through the act of recognizing our “Being” within—through our practice of presence, “creat[ing] its own supreme raison d’être.” In doing so, “we therefore apprehend . . . this perpetual renaissance within us, in every internal act, of a Being we always recognise, whose very essence is to be eternally reborn.” ♦

Wally Swist’s books include Taking Residence (Shanti Arts, 2021), Evanescence: Selected Poems (Shanti Arts, 2020), and On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays (Adelaide Books, 2018). A Writer’s Statements on Beauty: New and Selected Essays and Reviews was published by Shanti Arts in 2022. His latest collection, Aperture, was recently published by Kelsay Books.

Image: Detail from A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), Stanford Robinson Gifford, 1862.