Never Fails

My mom hated the holidays and loved them. 

She hated the stress.  If Mom had been a Super Hero, her Super Power would have been “worry.”  There was no problem so big that she could not train her anxiety onto it with laser-like intensity, and fret it into submission.  Of course, nothing she worried about ever happened, which only proved how effective her worry was.  She didn’t like to worry, or even choose to worry.  In some ways, she had no control over it, in the same way that Bruce Banner has no control over the anger which transforms him into the Hulk. 

So, even though every year she promised that “this holiday would be different” and that she was going to relax and “give everything to the Lord,” she would still, never fail, worry about everything…would people be happy with their presents?  Would the food taste good?  Would the decorations be up in time?  Would all the Christmas cookies get baked?

But she loved the holidays too.  One of the things she loved most was having us all together.  It doesn’t happen often anymore, now that my sister Diane lives in Phoenix with her husband Dale, and my brother Brian and his wife Maria have settled down in Orlando with their dental practice.   So during the holidays, Mom treasured having us all under the same roof again, sitting around a dining room table that had been expanded thanks to an entire sheet of plywood.  She loved cuddling or playing board games or making puzzles with her eight grandchildren.  She loved having Diane make her famous frosted sugar cookies.  She loved reminiscing over the scrapbooks that Jenny creates.  She loved having my brother Todd and his wife Tami bring in a big pot of soup so she wouldn’t have to cook, or better yet, suggest that we order out for Chinese food from her favorite restaurant.  Her eyes would light up and she would grin.  “Gooooood i-DEE-ah!” she would say in a silly voice that mimicked a character in some movie she had enjoyed but I hadn’t seen.   

And more than anything, she loved the time after the evening meal was done and the dishes were cleared away and we played a Rummy-style card game we call “Tick.”   As we dealt hand after hand we would recall funny stories and laugh.  She won more than any of us.

This last year, 2013, we had fifteen of us at the house for one of our celebrations (due to complicated schedules we celebrated two Christmases.)  Fifteen of us at the house, but we only set the table for fourteen.  Mom can’t sit at the table anymore.  She takes her meals in her recliner, my dad holding a cup to her lips and coaxing her to drink.  It had been a good day for her.  She had taken in all of her breakfast smoothie and most of her lunch one. 

When someone you love has Alzheimer’s disease, you are constantly adjusting your definition of a “good day.”

It used to be a good day when she could get through an entire game of Tick, even though she never won anymore.  Then it was a good day if I could convince her that, yes, this was the house she had lived in for the past fifty years and not a new one.  Then, a good day meant that we had gone on a walk or taken a drive together as she clung to my hand.  Eventually, a good day meant that she had remembered my name, and then it meant that she had strung some words together in a coherent sentence.  About a year ago, it was a good day when I would kiss her wrinkled cheek, then press my cheek against her lips and receive a kiss in return.  A few months ago, a good day meant I was able to meet her gaze and get her to smile, recognizing that there was a friendly face in front of her, even if she had no idea who that face belonged to. 

We don’t have any of those kinds of “good days” anymore.

We sat at the table, waiting to start the meal.  The food smelled delicious, and the dining room was crackling with conversation and laughter and memories.  My dad’s chair was still vacant, which meant that he was tending her, and we wouldn’t start without him.  I rose from my seat and walked down the dark hallway to see if I could offer some assistance…not because he needed it, but because it might allow us to start the meal sooner.  Other than someone to sit with her while he runs an errand every few days, Dad doesn’t need any help.  We’ve talked about it several times, but he has always insisted on taking care of her his way.  An engineer’s way.  So he keeps his schedules and meticulously records her intake and output.  He’s built ramps so he can wheel her to any part of the house.  He carefully checks for bedsores.  He records her weight.  Anyone else—anyone less heroic—would have had her in a home by now.

I knock lightly on the door to the bedroom.  “We’re almost ready!” he calls.   I push the door open.  She sits perched on the edge of her hospital bed, staring blankly, her arms curled up against her chest.  He’s put socks on her hands to keep her warm.  Mittens are too hard to get on and off.  “I just need to get her into her wheelchair,” says Dad.  He’s wearing a special weight belt he designed and built to keep his back in alignment as he does any heavy lifting.   He got the idea while taking care of Mom.

He bends down and embraces her, getting ready to begin the maneuver that will get her from the bed to the wheelchair.  But before he lifts her, he pauses, his arms wrapped around her as her head rests against his shoulder.  “This is when I get my hug,” he says.  I don’t say anything.

“It always reminds me of the first time I hugged her,” he continues, rubbing her hunched back.  “We were in Milwaukee, helping out with some youth group dinner.  Everyone had left the hall, but she stayed behind to clean up and I offered to help.  After we were done she thanked me by giving me a hug.”

Then he lifts her to her feet, smoothly pivots her around and gently places her in the chair. “I was too tall for her, so she stood on the tips of my steel-toed shoes.  Of course, I was seeing another girl at the time…”

He removes his weight belt.  “Then there was another time a couple weeks later when we had a Halloween party, and some guy in a hobo costume kept bumping into me.  After about the third time I’m thinking ‘who the heck is this guy?’ and I look down…and it’s her!”  He chuckles.  “She had on her dad’s old clothes and one of his stogies in her mouth.”  He starts wheeling her toward the door.

I had never heard those stories before.  As she rolls past me, I am filled with a strange sense of awe.  Even now, as I write this, I still feel it, as I think about how those silly flirtations and that stolen hug grew into a family crowded around a massive holiday table.

I hate Alzheimer’s.  I hate the way it relentlessly sucks away life and personality and dignity. 

But in the midst of it, I am also grateful.  I am grateful for these glimpses within our Valley of the Shadow that allow me to see that the ancient words are true:

Love never fails. 

The three of us move from the dim, quiet bedroom, down the dark hallway toward a dining room filled with noise and light and laughter.  Love never fails.  This is no wishful greeting-card sentiment, but a solid rock on which someone can build—and has built—a life, a marriage, a family.  In these brief moments of darkness and drought, it shines all the brighter and flows all the sweeter. 

Love never fails.  It inexorably expands and advances in depth and breadth…

…gently, joyfully, powerfully, defiantly, triumphantly unstoppable.