Originally posted on July 10, 2008
Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” (Ephesians 6:2-3)
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Last Sunday afternoon, I went to the nursing home in Clovis to see my mother. I don’t go very often. I know others have judged me unkindly with regard to my mother’s care as if perhaps I don’t berate myself enough or feel guilty enough. I love my mother. If love is really love, there is action involved. I believe that too. Love that moves us to action is the only kind that has eternal value. This, I know and believe as well. But, I can’t do anything about my mother’s fate. My older sisters have made this decision to keep her in a nursing home and I have no power to change it. Even if I tried, I could not meet her needs in my own home nor would she want to stay with me. There is little value in making excuses for my infrequent visits. I don’t need to be judged; because in this, I judge myself.
My mother will be ninety-two years old in August. She is frail and fragile, barely a hundred pounds. Once a robust, domineering woman, she is now small and weak. More than that, she is lost and alone. She no longer knows who I am, or any of my sisters, but more tragic, she doesn’t know who she is. Her little body still tries to work. From her wheel chair, she moves the furniture around in the sunroom and straightens magazines. She no longer knows why she does it. Sometimes, she rolls her wheel chair into the nurses’ station and tries to straighten up their things. They yell at her and make her leave. While I was there on Sunday, she rolled into a male resident’s room and began trying to move his bedside table out into the hallway. Something told her that it needed to be moved. He stared at her without speaking. The nurses did nothing. And, when my sister and I retrieved her and rolled her back to the sunroom, she became very agitated. She spoke some words we couldn’t understand in a high-pitched, sort of falsetto voice, and I knew it was born of anger and helplessness because other people force her to do what she does not want to do and force her not to do what she wishes to do.
Back in the sunroom, my younger sister broke a cookie and handed her a piece of it. She ate it and wanted more, so my sister gave her more. Another sister, had a small ziploc bag of Hershey’s kisses. Mother kept taking the chocolates out of the bag and putting them back in it. Over and over again, she would take them out and expect that we might share them and when we didn’t she put them back in the bag and said something that sounded like “they don’t want any.” A nurse brought over a tiny square milk box that contained a strawberry shake mixture and Mother tried to drink it. She kept bending the side of it with her thumb which prevented it from opening and that frustrated her more. She spoke over and over again in the strange falsetto voice the same words. “Baby” was somewhere in the middle of it. I thought it sounded like “My baby’s gone” or “My baby’s dead” or “My baby died.” My sister said it couldn’t be that. She said, “Mother always talks this way. She always talks about babies, but I don’t think she’s worried about babies. She’s just talking about them.” But, I feel certain that she is worried, perhaps even suffering because of something she imagines about a baby, whether it is her baby or someone else’s. She said the same phrase more than a hundred times in the hour that I spent with her.
I grieve for my mother. Her life, regardless of whether it was what we wanted it to be, belonged to her and it has been stolen from her. I don’t know if disease has taken it, or if being locked up in a prison called nursing home has taken it, or if she just didn’t try to keep it and it slipped away. But, she is an empty shell left on the shore. The waves still lap against her and sometimes others find her and inspect her and look for life that isn’t there and then they leave her where they found her and walk away and forget.
When I left the nursing home to drive the twenty miles back to my house, I felt so empty. The person I had visited had no resemblance to the mother who raised me. I thought about all of the difficult times I experienced with her as a child, as a teenager, as a young woman and I thought that if I could have them back now, I would see them differently. She did the best she could with what God gave her and she did the best she could with all of the experiences of her life that made her an individual. Every moment of our lives changes us in one way or another and it is in that process that we become a personality. I wept for my mother, so lost and vacant. I begged God to take her home because He loves her more than anyone here does and because she needs to experience His love, love that will save her, resurrect her, breathe life back into the forgotten shell. I want her to experience that perfect love from Him. She deserves to be loved.
I grieve for the loss of relationship that I wanted with both my parents and especially with my mother. I needed it. I thank God that He has allowed me to live long enough to realize that it is not about me. My mother strongly affected the woman I have become. In her own way, the only way she was capable, she loved me. I no longer believe that you honor a parent only through affection, meaningful conversation, or even time spent together. I believe you honor a parent by living a life that would make them proud, one that would bring honor to their name, and one that would honor God who gave it. And in those ways, I believe I honor my mother.
*My mother passed away on September 22, 2008.
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