God will not protect you from anything
that will make you more like Jesus.
For all our talk about the privilege of serving our parents, the blessings of caring for them, the joys tucked among the challenges, we can’t deny that, at times, caring for aging parents is excruciatingly hard.
“In her last years,” Karen said, “Mom harmed herself by scratching and digging into her skin, causing huge wounds. She wouldn’t stop for anything. We begged, pleaded, reasoned, and argued.
“Finally, we enlisted the aid of a wound-care specialist who wrapped the wounds (mostly on her legs and arms) in medicated wraps and materials that were cast-like. It would give her some relief, but then only hours after returning from the clinic, she would tear into those wraps and do more damage.
“I often found her in her bathroom or bedroom surrounded by blood. In her mental state, she thought there was something underneath her skin that she needed to get out. It was sad and heartbreaking and ghastly. Who can bear seeing their parent like that?”
Bryce said, “For some reason, Dad got it in his mind that we were stealing from him. It seemed ludicrous to us since he had little money that wasn’t designated for paying his bills at the assisted-living facility. Ludicrous and gut-wrenching.
“My brothers and I were paying for many of his extra needs out of our own pockets, sacrificing time and a hundred other things to try to keep him comfortable. His suspicion of us was so hard to take. He stood firm in his conviction that one of us—or maybe all of us—had been stealing invisible money from his room. It was as real to him as the slippers on his feet.”
Bryce and his family members knew it was a cruel figment of their father’s malfunctioning imagination, a symptom typical of many elderly who suffer dementia issues. But that didn’t suture the wounds their father’s anger and suspicion sliced open.
Elizabeth enjoyed a comfortable relationship with her mother, even when her mom was well advanced in age. “I remember pushing her in a wheelchair through the flowers at the local garden center. She wanted to buy almost every plant she found.
“I helped her pick out three she liked. After our outing, we put the flowers on her porch at the nursing facility. She seemed so happy. It was one of the last days we had together when we had a good time.
“Her dementia worsened,” Elizabeth recalled, “and I became—in her mind—an enemy, instead of her daughter.
“She’s been gone for over seven years now. But each spring, as I roam through the plant section, I think of that one special day we had together.”
Delores was put in an unenviable position. Her mother had been abusive all of Delores’s life. But the court appointed her as guardian when her mother could no longer care for herself. “I did it because I was needed,” she said.
“One day I took her for a drive to several spots where she’d grown up. When we got back to her house, she asked me to take off her shoes before I left to go home. As I knelt before her, she said, ‘Thank you.’ That’s the first time I’d heard those words from her.
“Then she put her hand on my head and commented, ‘Why is there silver in your hair?’ I felt God’s presence,” Delores said, “in the benediction-like moment.”
How sweet even small graces are when caring about or for our aging parents. How meaningful the love God enables us to show to those who don’t always return it. How difficult but holy the sacrifices when there’s pain in the offering.
“My caregiving for both my mother and my father started when I was a child,” Elaine told me. “At eight years old, I was drafted into service because of my father’s multiple heart attacks, a special-needs brother, and my mother’s frail health. At thirteen, I balanced the checkbook and filed the family taxes in addition to physical caregiving.”
That level of caregiving does not come without a price tag.
“As much as I loved my mother,” Elaine said, “we were very dissimilar, and my heart’s cry was for her to understand who I was . . . just me. She dismissed my desire to write as inappropriate and an unprofitable enterprise. She objected to my work in the theater and considered it unimportant. She grudgingly accepted my becoming a librarian but felt it wasn’t the kind of job where I was really needed and I should be able to just take off if family required my time.
“I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loved me, but she did not understand me. Then the roles reversed. Somewhere along the line, I made the choice to give her the kind of care and acceptance I had always wanted from her but felt was lacking. I discovered the truth behind what C. S. Lewis had to say about actions and love. Willfully acting toward another with good intent and kindness produces love.”
“Christian love, either toward God or toward man, is an affair of the will. . . . Love in the Christian sense does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves and must learn to have about other people,” says Lewis in his book The Four Loves.
Which of us from healthy homes would imagine a time when we might have to be intentional about loving our parents? That we might need to show kindness as an act of our will?
The rigors of caregiving, the soul-straining emotional price, can make us feel emotions we didn’t think possible and face resentments we thought ourselves incapable of experiencing.
Why would God have made it a point to say, through the biblical writer, “Husbands, love your wives” (Ephesians 5:25 NIV)? Or “Love one another” (John 13:34 NIV)? Those verses are written as if love is a directive that can be followed rather than an emotion that is either present or isn’t. And so it is.
Love—at its core—is more attitude than feeling. And the purest love is a response to God at work within us.
As our parents age, even the best relationships can fray at the edges or experience a seismic shift that splits hearts in two. Feelings of love threaten to slink away in the night, replaced by less-appealing obligation or tolerance.
It’s easy to love when someone is loving toward us. But God said, in essence, that even the unbelieving know how to do that. If you love when it’s not being returned, that’s when it’s remarkable.
“If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have? . . . Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete,” Matthew 5:46, 48 (CEB).
God,
I never wanted to look at my parent
And say,
“Loving you
Is too hard
Right now.”
But even
As I write these words,
I’m reminded
That’s exactly
What You did.
You looked at me
And said,
“Loving you
Is too hard
Right now . . .
But I will
Anyway.”