CC34: Pseudo-Enlightenment
My friend Linda is dying of cancer, but this isn’t the part I’m worried about.
Linda was first diagnosed with colon cancer three years ago, and she’s had a challenging course. The cancer has metastasized more than once. Most recently, a tumour was found in her brain. She’s definitely going to die. The people who love her are going to miss her, but she’s going to die, and that’s the reality of the situation. Her friends and family will grieve in different ways, depending on whether or not they believe she has transitioned to a loving afterlife in Heaven with God. But prayers and faith will not stop Linda from dying.
No one, no matter how devout, gets out of this life alive.
I’m not losing any sleep over the idea that Linda is going to die. It will happen when it happens, and nothing I think, say, or do will have any effect on the outcome. That’s up to Linda, her doctors, and her God.
On the other hand, I did lose sleep — quite a bit, actually — worrying about Linda’s mental state over the past few months. It’s not that I thought she was mentally incompetent in a medical sense. (Her doctors didn’t deemed her incompetent, even after the discovery of the brain tumour.) My concern was that Linda was starting to behave like a tyrant — an abusive, controlling, manipulative tyrant. A bully. A control freak. A nasty person. A cunning person. A person who’s not very nice to be around.
I’m not alone in this assessment. Linda’s behaviour became so verbally and emotionally abusive that in August she drove her own mother out of their shared home. Linda’s mother is in her mid-80’s, so this hasn’t been easy for the family. Linda’s mother moved out because she couldn’t tolerate the abuse from her daughter any longer. (Good for you, Kay!)
Linda has been relying on her network of friends to help her while she receives palliative care at home, but each time someone objects to her demands, she “fires” them. One by one she has cut off most of her oldest and dearest friends.
She has also fired several paid assistants. This is because they haven’t been doing a good enough job, according to Linda. Some have also been accused of stealing.
Despite her aggressive behaviour, she was not delusional until quite recently. (Delusional thinking appeared for certain only in the last couple of weeks). Until recently, she showed a truly frightening grip on her own mind, her own logic. Her memory was excellent in all areas where she wanted to exert control. Her ability to organize her environment was fine-tuned to the point of obsession. (She had a pre-existing diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, the symptoms of which were unfortunately exacerbated by her cancer treatments). She retained an ability to recognize and respond to social cues. She could be polite and friendly when it suited her.
All this was very upsetting. But I haven’t told you the worst part yet. The worst part is that Linda (a devout United Church of Canada Christian) has now come to believe she’s spiritually enlightened.
She believes that her battle with cancer has brought her to a point of heightened spirituality, a state of spiritual purity, a transcendent state of wisdom that her friends and family simply can’t understand.
She speaks often now of her “voice,” of her need to have her voice “heard.” Regular people can’t hear her voice. Only other spiritually enlightened people can hear her.
She thinks I’m one of the people who can hear her voice. But what I hear when I listen to her is the paranoid, grandiose thinking of a person who has suffered a psychotic break. Linda is psychotic. Under the stress of her illness and treatment, her biological brain has gone into “self protection mode” (sort of like the dreaded blue screen on a computer), and is refusing to accept external data and input. She’s now living entirely inside her own head. This means there’s no room in there for empathy. (Empathy requires you to reach out to other people, and temporarily place yourself “inside other people’s heads” so you can understand their needs.) Her brain is now a closed system. She’s stuck in an infinite thinking loop, which causes her to repeat a small number of ideas again and again, each time expressing them as if they’re new and exciting insights that have just occurred to her. To her, it feels as if she’s transcended time. She thinks she’s living in a state of enlightenment. But really her brain is “fried.”
No one who’s in a true state of enlightenment would ever treat people the way she’s treating people.
Linda’s doctors really dropped the ball on this one. They failed to arrange appropriate psychiatric care for her when it would have done some good. Now she has to live out her final days in a state of acute mental dysfunction. This sucks.
The honest truth is that some people will be relieved when Linda dies because she’ll no longer be able to abuse them.
If this isn’t a tragedy, I don’t know what is.
This is one portion of a large early 14th century CE (Yuan Dynasty) wall mural called “Homage to the Highest Power (west wall)” that originated from a monastery in Shanxi Province, China. It’s one of a pair of murals that expressed Daoist concepts of cosmic order. As part of the Royal Ontario Museum collection, the two murals underwent a significant conservation effort in the early 1980’s to remove earlier repairs that could have damaged the long-term integrity of the original clay, paint, and ink. I know this because I spent 8 weeks on the conservation project as part of a 1982 summer internship program. A properly trained conservator never tries to fill in the gaps by guessing what used to be there or trying to create perfection or wholeness where wholeness no longer exists. Hence, you’ll see many spots on these murals where bare clay is allowed to mar the perfection of the overall image. The bare clay spots mark areas where the conservators didn’t have enough documentation (e.g. early photographs) to support their beliefs about the original composition in those areas. It was more honest, in their view, to repaint only those sections where they were certain they were following the original intent and artistic conception of the unknown Daoist artists.
