POWERLESSNESS IS A CHOICE

As I walked through the high care facility past all the other patients, my heart was already sinking before I even got to the last bed where he lay. That image will forever be etched in my mind. He lay their motionless and powerless and I stood there, tears streaming down my face, also powerless. His fuel for staying alive was being provided by a respirator. The powerhouse that raised me was lying on a bed, helpless and completely devoid of any power that he once exuded as a strong, independent and determined individual.

My earlier memories of my dad was his determination and discipline of being a homemaker. Confident in his choices and his objectives for life, he was powerful in his own way. He powered through his objectives like a man on a mission, except it came with inflexibility in mind. His power was fuelled by a conviction that how one lived life was a fixed approach and that was the approach he bided by.

I learnt early on that flexibility in life comes with the choice to be flexible in our responses to that which we cannot control. If I could have given him the understanding of this approach, maybe the powerful determined person he once was would have thrived and continued to maintain his powerfulness. To stand by and watch him being at the mercy of life and thinking that life is unfair was hard. This made me feel powerless because I quickly realised that you cannot help someone who is not ready to be helped.

Here in South Africa, we have become familiar in the last few years with a life that includes what we term as “load shedding”. This is when the country’s service provider of electricity is under so much strain that the populations demand for power cannot be met and the service provider reduces the consumption by imposing periods of no provision of electricity. Some of us complain, some of us see the blessing in these moments and some of us are not impacted because we find alternative means to power up. The response is a choice. So is the response to how we approach life, especially in the moments when we feel powerless. In those moments we are humbled because we are faced with the reality that life cannot be controlled in order to mitigate the risk of feelings and emotions we do not like and try to avoid.

My dad crumbled slowly, over a period. His fixed approach could not bend with what life was throwing at him. He struggled with diabetes from before I was born. I remember suggesting to him the importance of a more physical life to help with the condition but that was not a priority in his life. Then we lost my brother in a car accident at the tender age of 26. We all struggled dealing with it and it broke me as well but I managed to navigate myself through my feelings, the questions, the implosion of my belief system and rise with a different lens to living life. My dad struggled and the struggle was compounded by his deteriorating health. His diabetes had progressed to taking insulin, to finally having to be on dialysis three times a week as his kidneys no longer functioned for the most part.

All the while, I was learning new things about the mind body connection, the diet we had adopted as well as being a physically active person. I continued to stand by feeling powerless and helpless because he felt this was part of life and of ageing. I had to accept that the possibilities I was exploring were not something he was willing or ready to look at.

The once independent, confident man was becoming dependent on others and I think that broke him more. I slowly saw the unfolding of unhappiness in a life that showed so much promise when I was a young girl.

The year of 2020 will live long in our memories for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. After a little over 15 year of dialysis, he succumbed to this dreaded virus. The dreaded virus, which I had also had before him, gave me the opportunity to be the last loved one to see him before his passing. The person that lay helpless on the bed before me was not the person who spent his young adulthood, raising three kids, being a loyal husband, son and sibling. The person who made sure we were taken care of the best he knew how to. I was daddy’s little girl, spoilt rotten in so many ways. There was a moment in my young adult life where I felt so powerless about my own life, I was crying and he told me “As long as I am alive, you have nothing to worry about.” It was hard seeing him on that bed, so lifeless and me feeling so powerless. In that moment of my powerlessness, he gave me the gift of surrender. I had to surrender to letting him go, letting him be at peace, letting him release the emotional, physical and mental pain you endured in you last years. I sometimes think you held on as long as you did because of me. Less than 24 hours after I saw him, my dad passed away on 5 September 2020.

The beauty of feeling powerless is the opportunity for trust in the unknown. Viktor Frankl, a psychologist and Holocaust survivor said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” I can let my father’s passing continue to leave me powerless but I choose to honour his life by being authentically powerful by acknowledging that life is bigger than just me and life and death are part of the complete cycle. A lot of us have been dealing with the loss of loved ones, but I truly believe that the physical body may die but the soul is immortal and the presence of loved ones are still with us. May we all find peace, strength and power during an unprecedented time in our history.