Posted by: admin in faith
My wife and I care about Mom and Dad, and due to Mom’s faith, as weird as it sounds, even though Mom is the one dying soon, we’re more concerned about Dad. As confident as we are about Mom’s eternity, we’re just not sure about Dad.
As he faces Mom’s end, his instincts are about as reliable as a well-used Cisco system - which means, not very. His current plan once Mom is gone is to move in with a neighbor we barely know because she has a room for him, and he doesn’t want to live alone.
We’re trying to get him to move in with us, because at least we’re family. But it’s a tug-of-war. At 86, it’s hard for a man who’s live in one place for over 60 years to suddenly want to move to an all-new area where the only people he’d know initially is us.
Ultimately, though, we can’t force him or make the decision for him. He’s of sound, even if of grief-stricken, mind, and so all we can do is encourage him to live with us, pray, and wait for God to move him in the right direction.
Posted by: admin in faith
Death tests your faith.
Once you are facing the end of your days in this life, you quickly find out how deeply you believed all those praise songs and Bible verses and sermons. Either your faith is rooted deeply or you quickly find out it was all just surfacey, good-time-rock-n-roll bull.
I suppose there are some who capitalize on grief, and if one has no conscience, they could find a lot of small business opportunities in the grief business. However, I believe now that there is definitely a place and time for grief-oriented services.
My wife and I are being cast as the strong ones in our family, the ones who will sacrifice everything so that everyone else can sacrifice nothing. Add all that responsibility to the loss we’re suffering and although we’re holding up well under the time of crisis, we have agreed we need to seek out a support group so we can work things through once Mom passes.
Marriage, like faith, takes effort and work and I’ll glad I have a wife who’s as willing to put in the effort it takes as I am.
Posted by: admin in faith
My Dad’s way of dealing with my Mom’s approaching death is avoidance. It’s not that he doesn’t love her; it’s that he loves her so much he just can’t face watching her slip away.
“I’ve seen one person die in front of me, and it never leaves you,” Dad told me today. “I don’t want that to be my last memory of Gert. I’d never get over it.”
This is a perfectly reasonable and understandable rationale, but it can seem cold and uncaring to some people. All I can say in response to that is, wait until you’ve been married to the same person for fifty-five years and then we’ll talk.
So if Dad would rather help a neighbor with a paper route once in a while than be at Mom’s bedside every single second, or dream of Las Vegas travel instead of staying in a hospital all day long, I think that’s his perogative.
As Mom herself said, we all have our own ways of dealing with things and we’re all doing the best we can under the circumstances. Judging one person’s way of coping as better or worse than another’s isn’t going to help anyone.
Yet that didn’t stop someone today from telling Dad, “Mom’s in the hospital and is going to die of cancer because of you.”
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Mom’s cancer is no one’s fault except perhaps her own for spending her whole life smoking. She’s received a generous 78 years, which is a lot more than most folks who smoke.
You don’t tell a man who’s losing his wife of 55 years that he’s at fault for her death. Some things should never be said. It is the very definition of laShon hurrah.
Posted by: admin in faith
On Friday my wife and I got the call that mom had been taken out of the home and moved into the hospital. Her stage four cancer is advancing quickly and we’re now definitely in her final days… probably her final week, at best.
While we stayed Friday night for Erev Shabbat Service in order to charge our spiritual batteries for the long, difficult time ahead of us, we were on the road home the next day and fortunately found very good hotel deals on short notice; on a weekend no less!
It’s difficult to be talking so plainly about Mom not being with us anymore in a few days; ironically, Mom is handling it better than any of us. She is a strong believer and the strength of her faith at a time like this - a time when most people would feel more like cursing God than praising Him - is humbling and an inspiration.
