Ecopsychology - aka the study of the relationship between human beings & the natural world through ecological & psychological principles.
For whatever funky reason, learning this new word lead me to thinking about my mother & mother-in-law, thinking of their elder years compared to many of their friends.
Mom could never figure out WHY her friends urged her to move into her own apartment in our local retirement village. She didn't see any up side to it.
I am sure that my mother-in-law also had friends urging her to sell her house & move into an "independent living" residence. Am sure my m-i-l would have found those suggestions as incomprehensible as Mom.
Merriam-Webster defines ecology as the relationship between a group of living things & their environment. From the same source, psychology is the science or study of the mind & behavior, or the way a person or group thinks.
Small wonder that ecopsychology got me thinking about those two women, long gone from our sight but always in our hearts.
To their dying days, four years apart, each lived in their own beloved house & home. For Mom Murphy, that was the house on Akron Street, the one she & John's father moved into soon after they married, the one they brought him home to from the hospital. For my mother, it was the house she'd shared with her dedicated daughter & devoted son-in-law for almost a dozen years.
It might have seemed that Mom moved in with us, but it was more a merge than a move. We provided the structure, while she added most of what is still the bulk of our furnishings, pieces collected by herself & Dad - the dining room table Dad got for a song from the manufacturer due to a faulty finish, the big chair she loved so much (the one Brenda always described as "in the Stickley style"; the couch that had belonged to Uncle Andrew & Aunt Marge; the black laminated coffee table that Mike had made for the apartment he & Kerry lived in before they moved to Australia. Mom's bedroom was filled exclusively with her own furniture, as was the living room, the dining room. She not only felt right at home, she essentially was in the same environment she'd shared with her O Best Beloved.
Neither situation might fit the description "natural setting" as meant by M-W, but it suits mine - our mothers, in their natural settings.
Both John's mother & mine spent all of their lives in familiar surroundings, emotionally supportive environments. When Mom looked up from writing on the wide arm of the big chair, almost every piece of furniture had a tale from her life as wife & mother. She walked across an oriental rug that might still have a microscopic fleck of saw dust entwined in a fiber, from when Dad walked across it when he got home at night from Lockhart Lumber. Every night, down on Akron Street, Mom M. walked up the same long flight of steps as John had as a tween, as Dad M. did after relaxing with a smoke & watching the telly, as she had at 30-40-50-60-70-80.
I doubt that either woman regretted for an instant not living in a more "independent" environment. And it has me thinking about Phoebe Bostock, who lived in her own South Avenue home until she was ripe with years, about "Aunt" Benita Odhner who did the same, of so many who had the "disadvantage" if living before Cairnwood Village opened up, freeing oldsters to sell their homes & move into easier-to-care-for apartments. How would they have felt, waking up morning to find themselves in a fraction of their space & a low percentage of their belongings & furnishing?
Learning the word ecopsychology, am grateful all over again for the fact that both my mother & my m-i-l were able to live - and die - in place, win an environment they loved, surrounded by the familiar, the cherished.
Mom could have moved to Cairnwood Village, into an apartment that had already been home to others, that would be home to others after she left, due to health or death. What boost to her spirits was possible because of being able to live in place all her life? How did ecopsychology - as I choose to interpret the word - impact her sense of being?
Questions worth the ponder. For both our mothers, a final closing of their life story worth any sacrifice.
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