My Mom is amazing. A woman who was the blue-eyed blonde my
father fell in love with when they were both juniors at UNC-CH. Oh, the stories
I could tell you about how they were meant to be.
Now, fifty years later, my mom’s sweetheart, the man who
correctly vowed he’d marry her… before he’d even met her…. is disappearing more
and more each day. While there are sparks of his personality - his memory, his
essence, his intellect… are all being affected by his multiple dementia
(Alzheimer’s/Vascular Dementia).
In these last years, we knew Dad was changing. His
personality had shadows in it that we had not experienced in all our years as a
family. Mom had the most regular and intimate interactions with these changes.
They weren’t easy. Anyone who has loved one who had dementia reads between the
lines in what I write and “knows” what I’m talking about.
All of us hurt for the loss of our Dad’s mental acumen. All
of us mourn the changes we see in his personality and his physicality (a
shuffling walk, a timidity still laced with a frequent stubbornness to “do
things on his own” and so forth). However, for my mama, it’s hard in ways I
cannot empathize with, only sympathize… because my dad has not been my best
friend, soul mate, lover, spiritual head of my household, father of my
children… he’s been Mom’s. And while similar, he’s not the same man any more.
But he’s still her husband, and he holds onto to that fact
even when his mind gradually loses other information. She is written in his
mind, but she is forever engraved in his heart… the man she covenanted with all
those decades ago. Each day, she becomes more and more his anchor in a world
that has to seem riddled with high waves of change.
For, you see, my mother took seriously the vows: “For better or worse, in sickness and in
health.” She (and we) just didn’t know there would be a death before a
death. But we’re learning… and it’s the longest goodbye.
Yet, even in that, my mom adjusts. She struggled to accept Dad’s
condition, but she did, and now – while she will never embrace it; that’s not
what you do to disease – she takes each day as it comes. Each morning sees her
honoring her husband in so many big and small ways, all the while holding onto
the hand of her Abba God until that day ends, that night comes… and then the
next day sees it begin all again.
Yes, my mom is amazing… in details and dimensions that I’ve
not even touched upon in one short writing. But on this Sabbath Sunday, as I
contemplate the temporal within the eternal, I give thanks for my mother… a
woman who personifies what is written in Proverbs 31, especially verse 28: Her
children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
The reality is: there just isn’t praise enough to fully
describe my mom.
