Aging parents want dignity and usefulness.
Grown children want to know that their parents are happy,
well cared for, content, and at peace. Can those goals coexist?
Is stubbornness a spiritual gift? Tenacity, maybe. Perseverance. But as our parents age, we tend to view tenacity as stubbornness.
A Bible-study friend said, “My father-in-law stopped at Burger King on the way to the hospital while having a heart attack because they wouldn’t have good food in the emergency room. Can you imagine?”
I could have countered with the story of my sixty-two-year-old mother who, while staying three hours away with an old friend from nursing school, woke with symptoms she knew signaled a heart attack. Instead of telling her hostess, she packed up and drove the three hours home—because she wanted “her own” hospital.
“My father wrapped his belt around his thigh, above the bone sticking out of his leg, and finished planting corn before he agreed that an ambulance might be a good idea,” said another friend.
Elizabeth says, “My mother tried her hardest to wrap presents for Christmas. It took her forever to get the job done. She had always done the wrapping alone and with great efficiency. But dementia had taken away the ability to do this simple task. She couldn’t even zip off a simple piece of tape. I watched her and mourned. I mourned for her memory loss and confusion but also grieved that in all likelihood, I would no longer receive a wrapped present from my mom. Watching her frustration caused me great pain on so many levels. Yet she insisted on trying.”
My husband tells me that when the time comes for his headstone to be carved, he wants the sentiment to mimic one he heard long ago: “See? I told you I was sick.” He’s trying to get me to promise I’ll follow through with that. But I can be tenacious too.
Stubborn can be cute, cutting, or potentially catastrophic, as with a delayed ambulance. Stubborn and dangerous share more than a little common ground. But if we examine the issue closely, much of what we determine to be ornery stubbornness in our aging parents is a tango of two persistent, persevering people: the parent and us.
I adopted one true story of a new perspective on the tango for a novel written a few years ago. A nursing-home resident refused to take her medication on the morning shift. The more the nurse insisted, the harder the older woman pressed her lips together and turned her head to the side into her pillow.
The battle raged until another nurse took the time to ask the resident why she consistently refused to take her morning medicine.
“That nurse gives me ice water to take my pills. I have all my own teeth, and I’m proud of it. But they’re sensitive to cold. I’ve told her that, but she won’t change her routine with the ice water.”
“You’d stop fussing about it if she brought you lukewarm water?”
“Of course. I’m old; I’m not stupid.”
What are we insisting on that makes our parent look like the stubborn one in the relationship? Some gerontology experts advise, “If it isn’t dangerous to their health or someone else’s, against the law, or emotionally risky, let it go.”
Philippians 2:3–4 (ESV) speaks to those who don’t want their own stubborn streak to get in the way of caring for and honoring their aging parents: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”
Meeting my widowed mother’s needs during the last years of her life wasn’t always convenient. But none of us are called to convenience—we’re called to serve others. Most of the time, love propelled my actions. On occasion, a time crunch or responsibility overload smudged my good intentions.
Confined to bed, my mother had few options for entertainment other than Gaither music and recordings of her sister’s trio, which played nonstop in her room. Reading exhausted her. Her eyes couldn’t focus on the television screen for long. Even her Bible reading had to be in short spurts. But she could play Solitaire on a small handheld electronic game unit.
One day, the game’s batteries died. It caused her an inordinate amount of frustration that she had no extra batteries. I lived a half hour away but promised that I would pick up new batteries the next time I was in town. That wasn’t good enough. Mom called my sister who lived in town, but she was in a daylong meeting at work. She, too, promised to get new batteries as soon as possible, but the earliest she could do it would be too late in the day to take them to Mom’s room at the hospice residence.
Mom’s agitation seemed far out of proportion to the problem. When she called me a second time, I was on the verge of saying, “Mother. It’s Solitaire. A game. You can be a little patient.” Instead, I rearranged my schedule and made a trip into town.
During a recent recovery from a minor medical procedure, I discovered an online game that helped me pass the time and challenged my brain’s agility. While I couldn’t read for long stretches and or sit at my computer to work, I could stave off boredom with a few rounds of the game.
Only then, six years after Mom’s meltdown over batteries, did I realize that her inability to have that small need met was a far bigger issue to her than it was to any of the rest of us. She had little else. When it wasn’t available to her, the loss was magnified by how few options she had. I’d thought her impatient and demanding. Instead, she was hurting.
Mom also insisted on having a fan blowing, no matter the season or the temperature in the room. When she finally confessed that the moving air helped her weary lungs breathe, our irritation and the chill we felt with that noise and air blowing all the time abated. We learned to wear a sweater or wrap in a blanket so she could breathe.
It was a solemn, love-hemmed moment when, a few minutes after her passing, we turned off the fan. The whirring sound we’d listened to during the years of her illness turned to silence. She no longer needed the fan to breathe because Jesus was breathing for her.
We missed the sound, the awkward and at-times-interfering breeze. But we didn’t regret having listened when we thought she was just being stubborn.
Father God, help me celebrate
The tenacity
That made my parents
Survivors,
The perseverance
They passed on
To me.
Guide me
To use it well,
In ways that
Respect my heritage
And honor You.