A Fraying Narrative of One’s Life
By George Hull
Editor, Pastoral Report - The Newsletter of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy
Dementia
A Poem by George Hull
A fraying narrative of one’s life,
echoing in gestures, glances, laughter’s balm.
The self is not erased but refracted,
like a familiar song on the radio
heard through static.Memory becomes a shoreline eroded by waves,
names, places, stories,
all washed out to sea.What remains are lived moments,
echoes faint, distorted, like a song half-sung.It’s just moments now.
They don’t join up.
When I wrote Dementia, I was thinking about how a life begins to loosen its hold on itself. Not suddenly. Not all at once. More like a well-read novel whose pages are coming apart, caught by the breeze, drifting in the air.
A fraying narrative of one’s life,
echoing in gestures, glances, laughter’s balm.
The self is not erased but refracted,
like a familiar song on the radio
heard through static.
So much of who we are is held in the stories we tell ourselves. We live inside those stories, and in many ways, they look after us. We weave the tapestry of our lives with the threads of lived experience, moments spun together into something that feels meaningful and fits us well.
With dementia, those threads begin to unravel, and life begins to fray at the seams.
But what I have noticed, what I wanted the poem to honor, is that the person does not simply disappear overnight. It is an insidious unraveling, slipping in like nightfall, on slippered feet.
A person loses clarity, like a picture out of focus. The self becomes refracted, broken into fragments of fractured light. You can still recognize them in a characteristic smile, in the way they reach for your hand, in laughter that comes unexpectedly in what seems a moment of true connection. But like the ocean, such moments ebb and flow.
It reminds me of what John O’Donohue wrote about presence, how the soul is not confined to the thinking mind, how there is a deeper knowing that lives in the body, in feeling, in connection. When memory unravels, something more elemental begins to surface.
Words fade.
Yet gestures speak.
Stories disappear.
But emotion remains.
Memory becomes a shoreline eroded by waves,
names, places, stories,
all washed out to sea.
