Rose's Stone Soup: The Heroic Pathway

Sunday, March 7, 2010

The Heroic Pathway

In exploring the heroic journey and its psychological strucure I have come to understand more deeply how that structure breaks down at the end of life. The more one clings to the personal heroic structure one has created, the more difficult one's death is. I will be using methods of analytic psychology and Jung's concept of active imagination to explore more fully this transformation at the end of life based on my experience as a nurse and a psychotherapist.

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Grimm's Fairy Tale- Godfather Death

As the Grimm's story goes...a man becomes the father of his 13th child, a son. Realizing he is depleted of resources he goes out onto the road to find a godfather for his son but the first person he comes upon is the Lord God and the man rejects him as godfather because the man does not like how God proportions wealth, leaving some very poor. The next he also rejects, the devil, because he leads man astray. He finally settles on the third person he sees and that is Death. He likes Death because he "makes all things equal". Noone escapes death.

So when the young godson reaches an appropriate age, the godfather tells him he will make him a famous physician and he will be quite successful if only he does as he is told. When he is called to see a patient, death will be there. If death is at the head of the bed then the physician may give the patient this herb that grows in the forrest and he will be healed. If however death is at the foot of the bed, the physcian must tell the patient that all remedies will be useless and no physician in the world can heal him. So the physician agrees and becomes very famous.

So famous that when the king gets ill, the physician is called to his bedside. Death is already there at the foot of the bed. The physician thinks if he can save the king he can become rich and inherit the kingdom so he turns the king around in bed and gives him the herb. The king lives. The godfather is furious and warns him never to betray him again.

But then the king's daughter becomes ill and the king pleads with kingdom that whoever should heal his daughter will inherit her hand in marriage and the kingdom. When the physician arrives he sees death at the foot of the bed. Without thinking he picks up the princess , turns her around and gives her the herb and saves her life.

With that the godfather takes him down to the underworld where there are many candles buring of all sizes. These candles represent the lives of everyone. The small candles are those of newborns and the very old and the large candles are of those in middle years who are married. Which one am I, asks the phsyciian. Godfather shows him a very small candle ready to burn out. The physician panics and pleads with his godfather to have mercy and put his light onto a larger candle. I cannot do that says death; I cannot burn a new candle without another going out. But death pretends to move the physician's light to another candle but lets it fall to the ground and the physician drops dead.

The Number 13

The number 13 represents the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. The number 12 represents a complete cycle, 12 months in the year, etc. So we know from the beginning this story is about a significant change in one's life. Perhaps the father has reached his limit. He cannot handle more kids or does not have the money or food. Often our patients reach the end of their rope, their resources depleted financially and spiritually. It is often at times like this change comes about but not without pain and sacrifice.

What do we understand about this father's view of the world. It too has outlived it's purposefulness. We sense that his view of the world was cynical based on a hatred of poverty and of a God that would allow it. This influenced who would become godfather. He chose the godfather that treated all things equal, that more aligned with his new view of the world and how it should run. His heroic structure is breaking down. He worked hard all his life and figured he was due for a break but his life was becoming more compllkicated with no end in site.

It is important we understand that this man's heroic strcuture is breaking down. What worked before isn't working any more. Just as our bodies break down, just as our culture massages the younger version of us, our youthful side at a time when we are not feeling youthful, we are moving past that stage into a different stage.

Our culture doesn't seem to flatter us as much as we age. Ads speak to us about incontinence and sleeplessness, obesity and cardiac disease, dementia and assisted living. We are more and more on our own following a pathway that has more and more shadowy places and uncharted turns.

The Story of Rose

Like the man in the story, Rose had reached the end of her rope by the time I met her. She was diagnosed with metastic cancer and placed in a nursing home. Her home was sold and all her posessions distributed amongst the family or sold.

She was in a wheelchair because her bones were too brittle for her to stand. She had already sustained multiple fractures. She was notorious in the nursing home for her controlling behavior. She would oversee the aides who cleaned her room or made her bed and often had them redo it if it did not meet her satisfaction.

She lived with her husband in a corner room in the nursing home. He had dementia and often tried to stand up from his wheelchair and he would fall. Rose had to watch him constantly. She would not leave her room unless she was being sent to the hospital for radiation treatment. She was angry at her husband because he would not listen to her. Sometimes she would scream at him because he was very hard of hearing. The referral to me came because the nursing home administrator was threatenning to call adult protective services with her behavior toward her husband. Rose told me when I met her that she had thown a podiatrist out of her room because he wouldn't listen to her.

Rose's view of the world was no longer serving her needs. She was 84 years old so her heroic structure was long held in place. But it was slowly breaking apart. Her husband was no longer listening to her now that they were in the nursing home. She felt a loss of control and had to settle for mediocre management of her things, her environment and what was most disturbing, she was treated as any other resident. This meant that she was talked down to, told what to do, and there was an overwhelming expectation of compliance to the rules of the house. This she simply could not abide. She demanded doctors treat her with respect.

Rose's Stone Soup

View from Thoreau's cabin

Sunday, March 7, 2010

The Heroic Pathway

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Godfather Death

Grimm's Fairy Tale- Godfather Death

The Number 13

The Story of Rose