Dealing With Guilt And Loss

Aloha, and welcome to the Secret Art of Huna podcast, where I’ll be sharing how to use Huna, the carefully guarded spiritual, energetic and healing practises of the ancient Hawai’ians, to help you transform those bits of your life that aren’t working. To help you find your purpose, or maybe just to help you dump emotional baggage.

I’m Dr Jane Lewis and 20 years ago I was burnt out, depressed, unfulfilled, disappointed, directionless and deeply, deeply miserable. Huna enabled me to change all that, and so I now share it with whoever wants to experience a more joyful, fulfilling life.

Yesterday would have been my mother’s 97th birthday, so I find myself reflecting on loss and guilt.

Loss, because despite the fact my Mum could do some seriously weird and rather bad parenting behaviours from time to time, she loved me and I loved her.

Guilt, because I wasn’t there for her when she died and I’d agreed that she should be allowed to die, without asking her.

Dementia’s a funny thing and the understanding of it by the non-medical population has come a long way in the nine years since she was first diagnosed. Back then, I was one of the few who had a demented parent. Now, many of my friends are becoming carers or supporters of one or both parents with dementia, all in the space of nine years.

Luckily for me and for Mum, although she definitely didn’t see it that way, I was able to get her into a psychiatric unit when her hallucinations became too bad and too unmanageable. I knew when she held a kitchen knife to me that I needed to do something, although it was several months before we really got to the point where neither she nor I could cope anymore.

But sadly the unit where she spent nearly a year has been closed down. You don’t get the kind of support from the council and social services that you did back then. There isn’t the money.

Even though our understanding of dementia has come a long way, our treatment of and support for dementia sufferers and their carers hasn’t. As someone said on Women’s Hour this morning, dementia falls through the cracks between social care and health care in the UK, particularly for women.

You wouldn’t want to have to put your mother in a psychiatric unit but they were very kind, and she was safe, if very, very angry. Understandably so. Yet putting her into the unit isn’t the bit I feel guilty about. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do and she hated me for it, but I knew it was the right option and at the time, the only option that I could see.

The guilt has to do with the manner of her dying

She was in a home by then and got a cough, which went to her chest and became pneumonia. One option was to get her into a hospital, 25 miles away, which for a 90 year old who hated her life, the way it had become, was less than ideal.

One of the unfortunate aspects of Lewy Body dementia, is that the patient can have a lot of awareness on the condition.

Mum needed intravenous antibiotics and the home couldn’t offer that. Another option was to let her die, keeping her as comfortable as possible, but basically to let her starve to death. I opted for the latter, as I had had to do in the case of her brother a few years before. With her brother, I had other family members to consult, in terms of what they felt best. With my mother, it really was down to me.

Even that wasn’t the real source of the guilt. The real source of the guilt, was that visiting her as she was dying, I couldn’t face it, and left quite quickly, leaving her to die later in the day. The nursing staff said someone was with her when she died, so she didn’t actually die alone but it wasn’t me.

On this journey of grief and guilt, Huna has helped me enormously.

In the latter stages of her dementia, particularly before I got her into the psychiatric unit, I was using Ho’oponopono, the Hawai’ian forgiveness process, several times a day. I knew it was her illness but it didn’t make it any easier. However, Ho’oponopono gave me a means to release whatever dark thoughts were upmost in my mind at any given time. And believe me, there were some dark thoughts.

As far as guilt’s concerned, Huna’s helped me own it and resolve it

It’s enabled me to recognise and face up to less comfortable aspects of myself that my mother’s dementia and death threw up for me. You know, those things that you suspect about yourself, that you hope no one else will ever suspect.

It’s also helped me realise that half the things I couldn’t face about myself were my own bullshit anyway, they weren’t even true.

Huna also helped me in dealing with the loss

It was definitely my mother’s time to go and her death was a relief of sorts but I’m an only child and I have no kids myself, so she was the last of my immediate family.

What I had to deal with wasn’t so much the loss of my mother, in some ways she’d left several years before anyway, it was more the fear of lonely old age, even though I have a partner.

In my hospice work, I see this quite often in elderly women who’ve lost their husbands and don’t have kids close by. But it doesn’t frighten me anymore. And for that I’m truly, truly thankful.

Huna isn’t the only way to deal with issues of fear and grief and guilt, it’s a way. But because I’ve experienced the value of it, I’m happy to share it with anyone who wants to know more.

If you’re curious, take a look at my Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/SecretArtOfHuna, where I’m sharing Huna tips for women and men. And if I can help you in any way, with any of the issues that I’ve raised, do get in touch.

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