Don’t let their expertise at making you feel miserable
make you feel miserable.
Daniel drew a deep breath before sharing his story.
“My father was a good Christian man. Had a great sense of humor that he passed on to me. Tall like me. As a child, I thought he was perfect. As I grew into an adult, I saw that he wasn’t perfect, but I still looked up to him and respected him.
“In his later years, I saw a number of changes in him that eventually led me to feel ashamed of him. His gentleness became a harshness that often seemed cruel. His humility became a need to be recognized for every accomplishment, real or imagined. He’d once given God glory and now stole it.
“Dad became judgmental and self-focused. I would say I hardly recognized him, but I knew who he was—my father. And I found myself despising him at times.
“He wasn’t the man I had looked up to years before. I hoped and prayed we’d see his attitude return to that of the man I admired. But he died three weeks after my wife and I left the country for our first term as missionaries.
“On the other hand,” Daniel said, “my mother is just as sweet or sweeter than she was in her younger years. She’s ninety-three and in assisted living. She’s joyful all the time. Appreciative of the smallest kindness.
“God has blessed her with great contentment and peace in her final years. That is an indescribable comfort to me.”
Michelle said, “As my parents aged, ‘Honor your mother and father’ created both peace and fear—but ultimately it was the right answer every time.”
Remember the children’s book, Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman? A baby bird broke through his egg while his mother was out searching for food. The baby bird set out on a journey to find his mom, asking a kitten, a hen, a cow, and a dog, “Are you my mother?” The bird asked a number of inanimate objects too. The question “Are you my mother?” propelled him forward.
Toward the end of my mom’s life, she expressed a handful of irrational fears. I felt the question rise within my soul, “Are you my mother? My mother wasn’t afraid of anything!”
Gregarious parents who become reclusive, cultured and proper parents who grow sloppy and coarse with age, kind parents who become cruel or the courageous who become timid or the strong who grow frail. . . .
“Are you really my mother? My father? I hardly recognize you.”
Years ago, they probably listened to a teenaged child’s rantings, wild ideas, and irrational fears and said to themselves, “Are you my child? I hardly recognize you.”
The teen years were a season—rockier for some of us more than others. Aging-parent years are a season as well, a season of indeterminate length.
Who were our parents in their prime? At their best? Who are they at their core? How can we focus on and preserve their true legacy rather than the shadow of who they once were, or an illness- and age-shaped imitation of the real thing?
“It’s a choice. Like love is a choice,” Ken says. “I choose to fill my mind with memories of the days when my father was a strong force of nature in my life. When I walk away from his room in our home, my ears stinging from the angry words he’s hurled at me, I mentally wash my hands at the door, rinsing down the drain what just happened so I can get a good grip again on who my father really is, if it weren’t for his aging issues.
“I don’t pretend it’s easy,” he says. “But it’s protective for both of us.”
Tanya grieves over what dementia did to her sweet-tempered father. When the disease became full-blown, the man who hadn’t cursed a day in his life became foul-mouthed and hostile. He’d been one of the gentlest men Tanya had ever met. But the disease stripped all the gentleness away and left him a raging animal, twisting his face into distortions that made it painful for her to visit him and ashamed when anyone else did. His friends said they understood it was the disease. But they soon stopped coming.
Karen watched her mother slowly morph into a person she fought to tolerate and barely recognized. “I’m not proud of how I felt about her toward the end,” she says. “It was a hard, hard journey. For both of us.”
She tells about the day when her husband took her to the rehab center where her mother resided at the time.
“We arrived at lunchtime, so I was able to feed her. My mother had become so weak and was nearly blind too. Then my husband wheeled me (I was in a wheelchair, recuperating from a broken leg) and her (she was in a wheelchair too) out to the high-ceilinged lobby where the rehab-center staff had installed a twenty-five-foot Christmas tree.
“Mother and I sat in those wheelchairs in front of the tree for several hours. What a rare time! She was lucid, aware of who I was, asking about the family, laughing, talking, and almost seeming like she had been before she started declining. It was the sweetest time. I know it was a gift from God. She died in her sleep that night.”
Karen ended her story with these words: “God, help me to remember her the way she was that night and the way she was when she was healthy. I’m rolling the unpleasant memories onto Your shoulders. I can’t bear them.”
“The LORD is good,” reads Nahum 1:7 (CEB), “a haven in a day of distress. He acknowledges those who take refuge in him.”
No matter how adult we perceive ourselves to be, we’re never too old to crawl up into the lap of God and find a haven there. The soul-deep challenges we face as our parents age provide more than enough reason to seek comfort in His embrace.
Would you hold me closer tonight, Lord?
When I try to sleep,
I’m troubled by reminders
Of the hot anger
In my sweet mother’s eyes
Or the sting of my father’s
Harsh words against his caregiver.
Hold me closer, Lord.
I miss the people they were.
Tonight, all I have is You.
And yes,
You are enough.
But if You could give me
Other images
To cushion my sleep,
I’d be grateful.