I LIED MY WAY INTO LOVE

Her symptoms started when she was 47. I was just 17.

At first, it seemed like an extension of her usual forgetfulness or casual carefreeness. But then she missed the envelope when placing a stamp. A week later, she reached for a cup of water and missed it completely.

After two years of hospital roaming and a series of white-coated Japanese doctors unable to admit to “I don’t know,” they finally settled at:

“We can’t say for sure, but we’ll write down: young onset, atypical Alzheimer-type dementia, so that we can start her on this medication.”

It crushed me. It crushed us.

Plunged us into the Unknown.

I hated her.

I hated the doctors.

I hated God.

I hated Life.

But I lied.

I started to tell her I loved her, even when I didn’t.

Because my rational brain told me—we couldn’t know how many more times she would remember me. How many more times she would call me by name. How much longer she could still look me in the eyes and recognize me as her littlest daughter.

So I decided to clock it in while I could be sure it still counted.

It was so hard. So, so hard.

It made me depressed.

It made me insomniac.

It made me want to disappear and quit life.

But instead, I found yoga.

And through yoga and meditation, I learned something else:

instead of quitting life,

I could just quit “me.”

 

Or more specifically, quit all the thoughts and ideas that made up who I thought “Mae” was.

And it saved my life.

Now, twenty years later, I receive letters—about caring for aging parents, about being at a loss in marriage, about not being able to connect with their own children… people who feel so lost and at the end of their rope, they don’t know who they are.

And my answer is always the same.

I don’t have an answer for them.

I only have my experience.

And my experience has been that whatever path life has put you on,

that feels like “it wasn’t supposed to be that way,”

I know.

I know that feeling: “it wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

And it always begins by just feeling it.

The shock, the dismay.

The pain, the numbness.

The rage, the ache…

All of the colors of human suffering.

Feel, feel, feel.

 

Let’s be clear: yoga, nor meditation, ever erased the pain.

It’s not designed for that (and the things that are designed for that only dangerously, temporarily numb the pain).

They showed me how to feel the pain.

Not dodge it. Not avoid it.

But to sit with it. To be present with it.

To be with it.

Quit yourself, but don’t quit on life.

Quit “my mom was supposed to be well.”

Quit “it wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

Even quit “life wasn’t supposed to hurt so much.”

Quit it all,

and find out what remains.

Because Life will always show you another way.

A way the former you couldn’t see.

A way beyond the scope of the limited mind of the old you who you thought you were.

And I promise you,

every time,

Life will show you:

You are so much bigger.

So, so much bigger.

That is still one of the bravest things I continue to do in my life.

I keep quitting who I thought I was.

And each time, it shows me that my capacity for life is bigger than I ever thought.

Just because I am.

The essence of I AM—Beingness—is bigger than thought itself. Always and Forevermore.

 

 

In the end, that’s what my mother’s illness taught me.

That’s what yoga and meditation revealed to me.

That first lie—“I love you”—led me to the truth of Love.

Love not as a doing or a role,

not as a series of roles, not even as a verb—though its expressions shape our lives—

but Love as the essence of existence itself.


Only that truth remains.