It's Nobody's Fault! -- thoughts on aging

Are you caring for an aging parent?  Perhaps you did care for them and now they have passed away.  There are many lessons to be gleaned through such a gargantuan task.  If you are currently involved in this task, you are likely too busy to read this!  If so, just read the four headings. J

This morning my thoughts turned to the last seven years of my mother’s life, those years of caring for my mother – how she changed, and how I changed as I helped her and walked with her through that tumultuous time.  My insights crystallized into four statements about the changes and difficulties of aging and dying:

1)       It’s no one’s fault. 

As I helped Mom with the normal everyday tasks such as cooking, cleaning, paying bills, and as we had to face monumental changes together – moving, leaving things and people behind, giving stuff away, switching the parent-child role – she would get angry a lot.  And she was angry at me.  I comforted myself and felt “guided” through all this by clinging to the thought, “These difficulties, sadnesses, and griefs are because of aging, and it’s no one’s fault.”

2)      You can’t fix it.

My default mode is fixing things and making them better.  The changes of aging can’t be fixed.  They can only be endured and lived through together.  It was a radically different kind of living for me – to make gargantuan efforts without being able to “fix” Mom, or fix her life for her, or make all this go away.  It was valuable to experience this in a “head on” sort of way, because, truth be told, there are lots of things I had been trying to fix in my life that were not in my power to fix.

3)      It’s not going to have a happy ending.

Watching someone age, and knowing that someday they are going to die, is the ultimate downer.  The thought could have presented itself, “If it’s not going to have a happy ending, why try?”  Most people are tempted to quit when the obstacles are too high and the outcome is anything but assured.  In fact, it is downright heroic and even mystifying when someone presses on in the face of unbeatable odds.  In To Kill a Mockingbird, when Atticus tells Scout that defending Tom is something he has to do even though he probably won’t win, I am admiring yet confused.  But now that I have gone through it myself, I understand -- there are a few things in this life that are worthy in themselves, regardless of “success."

4)      It’s all going to be OK.

It’s not really explainable, but love makes it all OK.  Love, and God, and eternity.  Knowing that I had given my all for Mom, that I had truly loved her as a daughter should, gave me a sense of rightness and completeness that nothing else in my life has done (other than raising my children).  And that love has an “outside of this world” component.  There was a sense of God walking with us.  This made it far better for me than if I had walked with her toward death and knew there was nothing else.  That would have been senseless, purposeless.  But with God, everything, even aging and death, seemed to have purpose – even if that purpose didn’t fit into my puny brain at the moment.  After she passed away, I was laid low with heavy grief for a while, but I glimpsed her life in that Great Beyond, and I knew she was now OK and happy --- more complete and happy than she ever was or ever could have been in this fallen world.  Amen!  

“All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.”