(This is part three of a three part series. Here is Part I and Part II)

And this is to say nothing of how hard it was for me and my mom to find collaboration and harmony between us. She actually did not believe she was really ill. She thought satanic forces were responsible for her deteriorating health.

She, also, heard and conversed with voices around 80% of the time. Some of those voices she said were “evil voices” and some of those voices she said were biblical figures. One, she even believed was God’s. Between me and what she believed was “God’s voice”, who was she going to listen to when “the voice of God”was telling her one thing and I was telling her something different?

These conflicts could happen over mundane matters, like when shopping for clothes, or life and death matters like when she would stop taking her medications and put her life at risk. As her health deteriorated, my mom became more critical about living with me too. Sadly, I would come to consider a day of minimal talking between us to be a “good day.” This was no way for us to be living.

My Mom Was a Black Belt Before I Was

My mom would reach a point in 2015 where she would be hospitalized at least once a month, due to her declining health. Thankfully, the frequent hospitalizations would cease once she moved in with me in 2016. Somehow, in no small part due to persuasion and pressure from me, she would agree to adhere to enough of her treatments for her physical ailments to stabilize. Her kidney disease would still continue to worsen, however.

In February 2018, my mom would succumb to her kidney disease, sadly. As heart breaking as the entire ordeal was, it was a testament of her resiliency and fortitude that my mom did not take her own life. According to research, people with severe mental illness have a suicide rate 20 times higher than the general population. I dared not ask my mom, because it would have caused me more anguish and pain, but I am sure that the “evil voices” told my mom she should kill herself. She would tell me, at times, other denigrating and threatening things they would say to her, after all.

My mom suffered immensely, an unimaginable amount, but she was a warrior, through and through. She wanted nothing more than to reconcile with her family and, rather than be estranged from her family, to live with family, particularly me or my sister.  She fought every day against “the dark forces” that she believed were responsible for her situation and trying to harm her and even kill her.

When I received my black belt, a lot of people, including my first Sensei, Penny Sablove, told me how proud they were of me, since it showed a lot of resilience and fortitude on my part. My training was derailed and even put on hold for several years, due to my family situation, but I persevered. This paled in comparison with what my mom went though, though.

Thus, since receiving my black belt, I regularly place my black belt and my folded aikido hakama on her chair, the one she bought shortly after moving in with me, in honor of her and to collect her ki. I told her when I first placed them there: “You were a black belt too, mama. You earned yours before I did.”

As I have explained, aikido is in essence about finding harmony, and I did that in trying to help and take care of my mom the best I could. The disappointments, traumas and real instances of discrimination, neglect and maltreatment did not allow for much “ai-ki”, however. In those instances, to just “accept” or “look for the positive in the negative”, as some simplistic adages go, would have been tantamount to accepting gross injustice and even oppression. No, in such situations, more assertive aikido is necessary and “incapacitating” an attacker might be the only option in them.

What remains the same, though, in this “style of aikido”, what was present in what I did for my mom was to lead with LOVE. That included the times when I had to make decisions in her “best interest”, the hardest one being when I had to decide to put her into hospice care.

That LOVE helps me live in the aftermath, as well, as I know it got me through what was an impossible situation in caretaking. Without those last two years of my mom, I honestly do not think I could live with myself. My mom would have died estranged from her family and in a hospital or in the streets alone. The grief from that would have been unbearable.

Aikido has shown me there is a better way to live and how to live with one’s principles and integrity intact. I can only hope others are finding it as transformative for them as it has been for me.

“The true meaning of the ‘samurai’ is one who serves and adheres to the power of love.” ― Morihei Ueshiba, The Founder of Aikido