And when their voices are stilled,
another is heard in the mist—
the cry of the newly orphaned.
N. L. B. Horton penned this stirring, heart-gripping story.
“I’ll receive Dad’s ashes tomorrow. They mark the end of a wild and horrific elder-care adventure that started eight months ago. Responsibilities as executor will continue for at least nine months. I hope to breathe again when I celebrate Christ’s resurrection next Easter.
“Dad’s ashes will bookend Mother’s, which sit in a box on a shelf in my office—to the right of A. A. Milne books from my childhood, above books on feminist theology. Mother died a week before Christmas.
“Where I live, winter hits hard. Scattering her ashes across the snowfield would have left a grey streak that screamed, “Mother is dead!” for months. She would have returned to haunt me for leaving her out there like that, even though I’m confident that she has better things to do in heaven—such as glorify God and love Him forever.
“So I waited for spring. When our meadow is rich with asters and wild roses, populated with deer and elk, foxes, and the occasional bear and mountain lion all summer. Below the subalpine grassland where the Patagonian shepherds herd masses of sheep each June and the fireworks burst above the spruce forest on the Fourth of July.
“Then Dad’s health failed. Scattering them together would be a fitting tribute to an almost sixty-seven-year marriage, and I braced for impact.
“Flights back and forth became more frequent. Decisions became more complex. Do I authorize a biopsy if the surgeons can’t treat what they think they’ll find? Does he need to move from assisted living to a nursing home? Do we really have to discuss hospice-level care? How do I weigh sanctity of life against terminal illness?
“I am confident about eternity, believing what I learned while studying for my master’s degree from a fine seminary. I ‘get’ heaven. But reaching eternity was proving difficult for the second time in four months. I kept praying.
“I had just returned from keeping Dad calm during a collapsed lung when I got the call. His health had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. We were in the middle of a bodacious spring snowstorm. The pass between the airport and me was closed, so I received updates every hour or two for forty-eight hours.
“Before the storm ended, he died. As my father’s daughter, I reel from the loss.
“I’ll receive Dad’s ashes tomorrow. When I celebrate Christ’s resurrection next Easter, I’ll also look forward to the Second Coming. With my parents, I will glorify God and love Him forever. Hallelujah.”
With my father long gone, my mother’s death in 2010 made me an orphan. Before I left the hospice residence, before the coroner arrived, I already felt like an orphan. Many others have expressed a similar sensation. No matter how old we are, when our last remaining parent passes, something within us cries out like the parentless child we have become.
We go on. We all do. But not without a significant shift in our approach to life and faith and forever.
Mary Elizabeth says, “One of the things I wasn’t prepared for was ‘the after’ when my Mom died. Caring for both my mother-in-law and my own mother for a period of nine and a half years changed me and put my life on hold. I wouldn’t do it differently, but maybe I’d learn to plan a little better for the inevitable day when they were no longer the center of it.
“I also didn’t take care of myself the way I should have,” Mary Elizabeth added, “thinking there just wasn’t enough time.
“Long-term illness of a loved one takes a lot out of a person. I am still working through the repercussions almost two years later. God held me together through the process and was my greatest source of help. My husband and son shared the journey with me. Isolation is part of it during that time. Following the loss, one needs to venture out and make new relationships. And that can be hard.”
Valeri said, “We didn’t expect Mom to live long after the surgery that removed part of her brain, but again, she fooled us. Twenty years or so later, I realized that I had put my life on hold, waiting for her passing.”
So, we learn to live through it? That’s the lesson?
No.
Through it—through caring well for our aging parents, through watching God meet their every need and ours, through having all the fluff trimmed away because it doesn’t fit and never did satisfy, through walking our parent Home—through all of that, we learn to live.