Simply affirming someone's presence a great gift
I will never forget Susan. She was sitting in her wheelchair when I first met her. Her hair was disheveled. The expression on her face was confused. She looked into the distance with a vacant stare and waved her hand to and fro, senselessly. She did not recognize her family when they came to visit her. She did not remember the parents that raised her, the meal on which she dined that morning, nor the words spoken to her by the nurse only minutes before. Here, in the assisted living home, Susan spent the last several years of her life a frail, quiet, and for the most part, forgotten person.
The final season in life is full of profound changes. In some instances, this is a time of joy, forgiveness, revelation, and wisdom. When given the opportunity to reflect and share one’s legacy with younger generations, some discover new perspectives on life, and may, for the first time, become concerned with the eternal and lasting. Unfortunately, old age can also be full of losses. Many suffer terribly when their bodies and minds slowly stop working. Old age may involve a loss of autonomy, self-respect, or even purpose. Susan’s situation is in no way unusual. Alzheimer’s and memory-loss often give rise to the most challenging situations in aging. In the light of these losses and changes, the Church can’t be silent. We Christians have to look deep within our scriptures and traditions to find ways to reach out to our parents and family who are struggling with late old age.
One afternoon, I decided to spend a few minutes with Susan. She said “hello” and then became silent. I chatted about nothing in particular at first, and soon felt awkward and uncomfortable. So, not knowing what to do, I arose to exit. Immediately, Susan turned to me, and with words steeped in emotion and loneliness, asked me: “Where are you going?” I was taken aback thoroughly and sat down once again. This time I merely took her hand into mine and gazed into her eyes.
From there on, whenever I entered a room with Susan in it, her face lit up with joy and eagerness. She could not remember me on a cognitive level, but she certainly did on an entirely different level. I learned an invaluable lesson: how to be comfortable with silence, and to simply be present. In this way, we shared conversations through mere eye contact, and formed one of the most profound relationships I have known. I will never forget the brightness, transparency, and life of her eyes. There is no room for doubt, that underneath the disease, underneath the quiet, vacant, and wrinkled face, there was a living person needing love.
What does it mean to be a person? The world has all kinds of answers to this. Today, we tend to define ourselves by our accomplishments, possessions, or our social status, and on and on. But old age forces us to reexamine. A gerontologist named Glen Weaver writes, “The cruelest irony of contemporary culture may be that many who thought they had found their identities in the individualism, rationalism, romanticism, and materialism of western modernity… now find these foundations crumbling beneath them.” While I worked as a chaplain in a memory-care center, I often heard family saying, “She is no longer the same person,” “The spouse I married has disappeared,” or “We lost him years before he died.” What do we say?
Perhaps the church’s greatest gift to us when faced with these trials is its affirmation of personhood. We are not, in fact, defined by our accomplishments or even our memories. Each and every one of us is a unique person made in the image of God, with a body and a soul. Paul writes, “Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). In Christ, we trust that no matter how much the body fades and no matter what we lose in this life, the core of who we are is eternal and infinitely valuable.
What does happen to a person when they seem swallowed up by a disease? Christians have asked this for hundreds of years. In fact, in the sixth century, a church leader in Jerusalem, known as John the Solitary, also faced the question. He suggested that we can think of the soul as a musician, and the body as the musician’s instrument. “When a cord in a zither, or a pipe in an organ is damaged, it is not the finger that plays upon them that is at fault, but rather it is the artistic activity of the finger that is impeded from sounding forth by the zither’s cords or the organ’s pipe because the defects are in the instrument.” In other words, when the body stops working correctly, the soul remains alive and present, but is unable to communicate effectively.
No matter what happens to a person, the person is still alive and still with us. We can all help our parents, or siblings, or loved ones by simply loving them as they are. This is what Susan taught me. We didn’t need to talk. We didn’t need to do anything. All she yearned for was to be seen and loved as a person. All I needed to do was to slow down and be present with her. I’ll never forget Susan, and I look forward to getting to know her better in the life to come.