Mavis's Melting Pot

Helpless

'Helpless' always seems to me to be a strange word. Defined in the dictionary as 'unable to manage independently' and 'make weak' it still doesn't feel right to me.

Take the two separate words 'help' and 'less' taken literally they would apear to be instructing one to reduce the amount of help being offered.

However if I truly feel helpless, it is an awful feeling that I experience, a mixture of frustration, and failure. I tend to feel totally useless and even skills that I do possess, become as nothing, in the light of not being able to help someone in need.

If someone is in emotional pain I want to take a cloth and soothe a ravaged brow. If someone is hurting physically I want to relieve the pain and nurse them better.

There are several things that are able to reduce me to this feeling of being helpless. How do you help someone that is depressed? Whatever you say or do it is impossible to wipe away a clinical depression as if it is spilt blood. Sometimes depression is so severe that it is as if a soul is bleeding and a heart is crying, but silently with no outward tears.

Parasuicide and suicide can be real concerns, and when someone is in a deep black pit, they can view themselves as a monster or unloveable. No matter how much I tell that person that I care how they feel, I am unable to reach them. I can empathise, that is try to put myself in their shoes, try to view life from their distorted perspective, but it is not possible to feel or understand their depression which may or may not have a reason. Therefore I feel helpless.

Very different from depression is senile dementia, and or Alzheimers dementia. Yet the inability to reach through is similar. It is terrible to bear that failure to communicate, when all you want to do is to help in some way. to turn a mind back to it's former intelligent functioning.

I have a brother-in-law, Don, who has Alzeimer's. He is my husband's older brother. Their mother had Alzeimers and for the last six years of her life she progressed into a strange life of fog and obscenity. She had never sworn, and did not allow anyone to swear in her house, but when she became demented she used the worst obscenities that any of us had ever heard. At the end of her life she did not recognise any family, not even her husband of fifty seven years.

How helpless I feel watching Don's wife, who loves him dearly, struggling to come to terms with this person that she now does not know how to help. She pushes down memories of how it was for his mother, as it is too terrible for her to contemplate. Don was a very good Maths and Science teacher who never lost his love of teaching. Now he can not play or enjoy a simple game because he does not understand that you take turns.

I think that this discovery vividly brings home to me the situation, because we have always played board games as a family. Many hours in the past have been taken up with marathon bouts of Risk, Scrabble, Cluedo and any game you can think of.. I expect we have played it, as at one time we had over two hundred games. The games could last for many hours with intervals taken for meals. Now, Don is like a naughty child, who if not allowed to have his turn, every turn, all the time, throws the board and playing pieces. I feel helpless.

My nephew is autistic. This is James, a beautiful child, who is the son of my sister's eldest daughter. My sister Betty who died last year. I watch him in his world of non-communication with such a sense of helplessness. He is seven now and has never really spoken or made eye contact. I watch his mother struggle to cope and emotions at times are just too hard to hold in check, and we hold onto each other and don't need to say anything. I feel helpless

The other things that make me feel helpless are when as a nurse all I can do is use my skills and be there for the sick, injured and dying. Somehow that is a different kind of helpless, as it is a step removed from being personal. It is not family.

A major reason for me to feel helpless is watching some tragic life event on the television. The torrents of the tsunami disaster at the begining of the year for instance. The feelings of deep sadness, and above all a feeling of being impotent in any attempts to give enough, to make a difference or to be of any real help to anyone.

Terrorist attacks are another reason. There have been many over the years but I will never forget 9/11.

It was my only day off that week and I was hoovering as I waited for a film to come on the television. I was on my hands and knees reaching under the settee with the hoover. I straightened up and leant back to look at the television to see if the film had started. I got such a shock, there were the twin towers of New York and one of them had a plane flying into it. For a moment I felt annoyed because I thought that without any warning the film had been changed from the one I was waiting to see. As I was thinking this, and muttering to myself about how unfair it was on my only day off they had switched the afternoon film, I noticed a word in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, 'LIVE' and the horror I felt... Needless to say all thoughts of a film went immediately from my mind. I sat back on my heels and rang my husband at work at a college.

Nobody there had any idea of the events that were happening and they all went to the principal's office and watched the horror unfolding.

I stayed on the floor crouched, transfixed, for the rest of the afternoon. At times I cried as the further horrors of Washington and Pennsylvania were relayed across the world, to us in England, my heart froze, became paralysed with fear. My husband and I had said a tearful goodbye to our eighteen year old daughter as she had left us, to go to Gloucester County College in New Jersey, just seven days earlier. I was not aware of the geography then, and it appeared that she was in the middle of a triangle with the attacks happening all around her. I felt so very helpless. It was five hours before we finally managed to speak to her on the telephone. I have never been so relieved to hear her voice. Then of course, being the person I am, I started to feel guilty, because of all the loss of life that was now being shown endlessly in our living rooms. I lost count of the times we watched the towers fall, in slow motion, with a dust skirt billowing up from the bases. I felt so helpless.

Then this week in England it was 'Red Nose Day.' This is a day when money is donated by a large proportion of the population of the UK. Stunts and fund raising of all kinds are carried out. People are sponsored to shave all their hair off, to walk hundreds of miles, to jump fom planes etc... This is all in the name of supporting charities in Africa and the UK.

Again into our living rooms there are beamed horrific pictures of starving children and adults, survivors of wars and of abuse. Children who are like the living dead, with sunken, zombie-like eyes. Some had watched one parent die of Aids and were now nursing the other surviving parent with the same disease.
Harrowing scenes of children as young as four sitting wiping their mother's hair out of her eyes. After the parents are both dead, the children have no home and walk the streets sleeping in gutters. Sometimes a project funded by monies from the UK Red Nose days takes some in and cares for them but there are too many in need... I feel so helpless.

This is where I have to say "Stop! Stop! Stop!

Instead of helpless this is a time to be selfless. This means exactly what the two words 'self' and 'less' appear to mean. Less self, unlike helpless which did not mean 'less help' or at least only indirectly.

If I stop thinking of what I feel, of my feelings of helplessnes, and how they make me feel, then I can give more of myself, unconditionally, give willingly in a way that might in the long term help someone somewhere. I think of the person, event or situation and I then write my observations, thoughts and feelings down as poems. As everything is converted into emotional outpourings, verses emerge which convey messages from the heart. Or they bring to the surface from the depths, for all to see and ponder, like molten lava spewing forth from the bowels of a long dormant volcano, opinions and experiences.

If then in the fullness of time, a reader finds that my writing sparks a flame of passion, informs or ignites and fuels his or her interest, then I can truly say that I am not as helpless as I at first glance appeared. I have provoked thought and therefore I have a reason to be. I may actually be of some help alerting people to and identifying a vast spectrum of subjects. I am no longer helpless.