Going home: Even with Alzheimer's, the heart knows the way

When I was a boy, our preacher's family moved often.

Before I was 11 years old, I had attended a dozen schools in California and then Washington state as Dad and Mom took various pastoral positions, or sought employment between those "callings."

Mom would work as a waitress, sometimes holding down two jobs at once. Dad would take odd jobs ranging from warehouses and grocery store stocking to janitorial work and department store window display.

Always, though, the first thing done when my folks arrived at a new house or apartment was to set up the beds for my sister and me. That, along with Mom and Dad, and the smell of poached eggs and toast to send me off to school in the morning, made it "home."

When I heard the saying, "You can't go home again," I didn't, at first, understand the idea. When I later read Thomas Wolfe's novel, I grasped, though still did not share, the concept.

Home was where my family was, where I was tucked into bed at night with a prayer and a kiss on the forehead, sometimes after a story from Dad.

"Home is where the heart is," Mom would often refrain, fond of such truisms.

She taught that lesson to me decades ago, when as a young boy I both anticipated, and dreaded, going to a new school, fighting new bullies to earn my place as the "preacher's kid," and hopefully making a friend or two before the U-Haul truck reappeared in the driveway.

Time, as it will, has slipped by like an unrelenting river. I'm no longer young, but a grandfather. Yet, my Mom still taught me the Lesson during my trip this past week to visit her and my father in eastern Washington.

Dad is in an assisted living facility now, frail, just recovering from a mild stroke, but at 92 still alert, his memories intact.

Mom is in a 24/7 Alzheimer's facility. At 86, she is physically healthy for her age, but the disease has robbed her, and me, of so much. So very much.

She no longer recognizes me, nor can she speak more than a couple words, and usually nonsensically. 

As I tried to rouse her from a near-catatonic state, caressing her face as she sat in a wheelchair, I watched her breathe. When she finally opened her eyes, there was, for so long . . . nothing.

She stared blankly into space. No response.

Finally, my wife, Barbara, and I rose to leave. But before we did, as has always been the practice upon parting in the Preacher's family, we prayed.

I prayed for her peace.

What else was there to petition the heavens for? 

Wasn't the unspoken prayer that, with so much of her gone, the rest of that flicker of a once sharp, articulate and life-loving woman could also depart?

A final time, I bent down, kissed her softly on the forehead, as she had so often done to me.

 "I love you, Mom," I said, then began to move away, fighting the hot tears welling in my eyes.

There was a murmur, almost a whisper. "Me . . . too."

I looked back at her, but too late. Her gaze was locked on some invisible realm I did not share.

But, for an instant, I was home.

Love, work and deeds: Do you 'play for mortal stakes'?

The late Robert B. Parker, who created the literary Boston detective Spenser, entitled one of the series' novels, "Mortal Stakes."

Not the first time, curiosity over a title or phrase or quotation in a Parker book spurred me to investigate further.

This weekend, while reading a collection of Robert Frost poems, there it was:

"Only where need and love are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sake."

I read it several times. It had the feeling of . . . scripture.

The stanza above comes at the conclusion of Frost's recounting his joy of chopping wood -- until two unemployed lumberjacks come down the trail.

Silently, they watch him work . . . and silently, he understands that what he does for joy, they need to do for making a living -- mortal stakes. In the end, their need overcomes his joy; he pays them to finish the work.

This poem ("Two Tramps in Mud Time")  has so touched me that I've posted the above stanza at my work station.

Somehow, it makes me feel much better about starting another week of labor.

A painful lesson in Grace, 'truth,' and anger

Some lessons in life, seemingly, need to be repeated time and time, and time, again.

Case in point: Before you go off on someone about something you are just sure is true . . . confirm it, regardless the apparent veracity of your source. Then, think twice, three times, before going off on someone, period.

You can apologize after, that is true.

But you can never take back what was said, emailed, whatever. It still scars, regardless of a mountain of subsequent remorse and pleas for forgiveness.

I have, more times than I will allow myself to think about long enough to count, been on the receiving end of this phenomenon.

And I have been the perpetrator, too. Even lately.

Makes me slap myself, and appreciate Grace all the more.

We all deserve a coach ticket to hell, many times over, based on what we have done, thought, or even deliberately ignored or dismissed in our relationships with other human beings.

It's a good thing, a very good thing, that our Judge offers us forgiveness, not because of what we do, but through Grace, i.e. unmerited favor. Because of who He is: Love.

Doesn't mean, though, that we cannot improve. Day by day, decision by decision, we can choose.

I am going to try to choose better, and to do that with renewed commitment.

How about you?

Faith: A choice, a yearning to be more than an evolutionary dead-end

Take an evangelical, fundamentalist preacher's kid and mix him with a liberal arts education. 

Season him with more than a few decades of living, and you either come up with an agnostic, a metaphysical schizophrenic, or a believer, stripped down the basics of his faith.

I confess to, at times, flying like a confused, sometimes angry or at least disheartened moth, too close to the flames of the first two fates. The journey to faith — my own faith, not necessarily that of my parents — has been occasionally exhilarating, often painful, and all too human.

It has been, philosophically, an eclectic odyssey. That likely was inevitable, considering my History and Journalism double major and a minor in Psychology, followed by a career in journalism (a petri dish for cynicism, as professions go).

Ultimately, it is human nature that convinces me my faith — albeit skinned of what I concluded were doctrinal and theological assertions created not by an infinite God, but by finite human minds — makes more sense than pure secular humanism.

I could (but don't worry, I won't) write reams on why I find this so. Let a couple observations suffice:

— The fact that our species has not ceased warring with itself since it began, committing genocide on ever-larger scales, makes me bitterly laugh at the idea we are the pinnacle of sentient evolution on Earth. 

 

We may boast how much more sophisticated and civilized our high-tech, educated society is now compared to our stick-wielding, tree- and cave-dwelling ancient ancestors, but we continue to produce the same rotten fruit.

It's still about territory and resources, and who has the right — or might — to claim them. And since such brutal calculus always makes our "better angels" wince, we still use politics, religion, culture and racism as excuses and justification for dehumanizing and dismissing the Other.

— Yet, we desire to be more. I would argue that we were created for more, but are broken. Despite all the pain and madness humankind inflicts on itself and its planet, goodness persistently bubbles up within individuals, and reform movements. 

Changes for the better, history teaches us, are as finite as our bodies . . . yet we continue to reach down to the fallen with one hand, even as we bludgeon our enemies with the other.

So, faith. Because without it, without the saving grace of our Maker, we will remain stuck, either as an evolutionary dead end, or a creation to be ultimately redeemed, reborn and perfected.

I prefer to believe the latter.