Mom

I believe that mom is in irreversible decline. But, in the meantime, she needs to be comforted and be kept comfortable. Since she cannot feed herself and since it is not the job of the staff there to feed her, it looks like family members will need to feed her. It is a cruel death indeed to die by thirst or starvation. It brought a wave of indescribable sadness to see mom lie in a wet mattress, shivering because she was too cold, and barely able to sip water from a straw.

I think we also need to recognize that people work through grief in different ways. Grief has many masks and some people express grief through laughter or numbness, by maintaining their routines, by emotional disengagement, or by spiritualizing. This is a difficult time, and we need to be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has forgiven us. We also need to recognize that we have our own limits and priorities, and we need to protect ourselves from taking on more than we can or should handle, sometimes by saying no and sometimes by asking for help.

Finally, we need to come to terms with mom's imminent death. It may be days or weeks or months, but it may be that we're seeing mom's final battle. And the great gift that God has given us is time to reconcile us to her death. It's hard to do so, but for our own sake and the sake of our families we must do so. As she said to me "I know where I am going" and we need to be happy for that.

Anne has asked on more than one occasion the eternal why-- why this good woman of faith spent the last half decade in such pain. I think of C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the classic Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain. You may remember the movie “Shadowlands”, played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had a crisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end of the day, there are no satisfactory answers—only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends and family. In one of the last scenes in “Shadowlands,” we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears. Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God.

Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job—without an explanation but with the real experience of God—turns from questioning to wondering silence: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” In this fragment of time on this planet, we are in this together and we must help each other out. Suffering is inextricably part of the human condition, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.” It did not say, “My tragedy comes from the Lord.” The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning. When I have felt sad, I have taken solace in the familiar prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi: “O Divine master, grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”