My father drove twice a day every day to visit my mother in the nursing home.
Noon meal.
Evening meal.
He patiently encouraged her to eat. When she wouldn’t feed herself, he fed her. Through them, I watched that final scene of Driving Miss Daisy over and over and over.
Hoke: Looka here. You ain’ eat yo’ Thanksgiving pie. Lemme hep you wid this.
My father gently fed my mother.
He slowly pushed her wheelchair through the halls and for walks in the courtyard, sitting to rest himself as needed.
He held her hand when they sat together.
They were still two-become-one but in smaller ways that were really bigger than the ocean.
When she passed away, even though she had been disappearing in dribs and drabs over so many years, he was lost.
F is for my father, for whom I ache, who is benevolence, who does and does and does, and did and did and did.
His love and devotion for my mother sets the bar high for the rest of us,
Every time I do it, whether I’m using the separator, the shell, or my hand, I start thinking about my mom.
She taught me to cook — to level off the flour in the dry measuring cup, to get eye-level with the measuring cup when measuring liquids, and to crack the egg with a sharp rap using the back side of a knife. She taught me to pull the eggshell apart with my thumbs. She taught me to always put the egg into a separate dish before adding it to whatever I was cooking — we had our own chickens, and sometimes what came out of the egg was an unpleasant surprise. She taught me to get the last bit of white out of the shell with a quick swipe of my forefinger. She taught me to separate eggs, not allowing any yolk into the white because if I did the white couldn’t be beaten to stiff peaks no matter how hard I tried.
When her dementia robbed her of her cooking ability, she was so lost. No more cooking for a crowd. No more delicious soups where she put something akin to magic in the pot. No more casseroles.
Food was whittled down to marmalade. On everything.
But I can still eat marmalade.
There’s just something about eggs. They make me think of her.
An egg is both strong and fragile.
It is life.
And hope.
An egg is three-in-one, like God.
But the word “egg” only appears once in the Bible.
Somehow, for me, an egg inextricably connects mother to daughter.
It is a mystery — a pearly, porcelain, alabaster mystery.
Today, I’ll let Laurel try cracking that egg with one hand. Success or failure, we’ll laugh and then figure out what to do with the eggs she opens.
Maybe someday she’ll look at an egg and think of me.
The very best advice ever given to me was given by my mother-in-law.
When I had just one little boy, life was fun. Oh, I thought it was hard because he didn’t sleep very well, but, all in all, it was fun. I had plenty of hands and plenty of help.
My mom, Philip, and me
When I went from one to two, life just got funner.
Two artists
Going from two to three, though, meant that I ran out of hands, but that was okay. Backpacks and front carriers worked well.
Feeding seagulls
From three to four presented a problem. I had no where else to put a child.
Myrtle Beach – 1993
Somewhere in that two-three-four child range, I realized I was really struggling to do this job. My mother-in-law raised thirteen children. Well, actually, fourteen, because a cousin came to live with them when her mother died. I asked my mother-in-law one day how she did it.
“You just do,” she said. That’s all there is to it.
D is for Do.
“Fred” asked me a riddle the other day, “How do you eat an elephant?”
I think he was hoping I would say, “With an elephant fork,” but I knew the answer — one bite at a time.
You just do.
You take one step forward. Then another. Then another.
That advice helped me through child-rearing, and later, in the midst of adult caregiving. Caring for someone with dementia is not unlike caring for small children.
When life is overwhelming, look around for something you can do — some small thing, a baby step you can take forward or even sideways, a tiny bite you can take of the elephant.
Do.
My mother-in-law (center) surrounded by the fruits of her “do”-ing — 2011
John 5 begins with the story of Jesus at the Bethesda pool where lay “a multitude of invalids.” The belief was that after an angel troubled the waters, the first one in was healed. Jesus spoke with a man who had been there for thirty-eight years.
“Do you want to be healed?” Jesus asked him.
“Sir, I have no one,” the man replied. No one to put him into the pool when the water is stirred. A multitude of invalids, but each concerned for himself.
My father and mother enjoyed traveling after my father retired, but as my mother’s dementia grew worse, traveling became more difficult. One night in New York City, my father awoke to hear the heavy hotel door click shut and realized that my mother was no longer in the room. He found her in the hallway. Another time she got away from him at the airport, and still another time she wandered off in Greece.
On that trip to Greece, their last big trip, the other ladies in the tour group saw the need and began watching out for my mother. What began as a group of strangers ended as a caring group.
My mother and father on their trip to GreeceStrangers at the start, friends by the end
“Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community.” Anthony J. D’Angelo
Community doesn’t have to be intimate to be functional. Even a small thing, like holding the door open for someone struggling with mobility, can be an act of community. It says, “I am willing to help you, even if it inconveniences me a little.”
Sometimes community is very intimate. I was horrified to see that my mother had had an incidence with incontinence while visiting an old friend of my father. “Oh! I’m so sorry!” I had said when my mother stood to go. “Let me get something to clean that!”
“No, no,” the woman had said. “Your job is to take care of your parents. I can clean this up.”
Community.
Looking out for one another.
Circling the wagons in Greece, in Florida, in Cooperstown.
We can be community to those we encounter. We just need to be willing.
My father and I went to dinner at the Council Rock Brewery last night for their Friday night fish fry. If you should ever be so fortunate as to spend a Friday night in Cooperstown, by all means, go to Council Rock for dinner and a beer.
Chardonnay (for me) and beer (for my dad)
The what’s-on-tap list was long and my father hadn’t looked at it before the waiter came to take our order.
“I’d like a beer,” my father said.
“Would you like a dark ale or something lighter?” the waiter asked, his pen poised over his pad.
“Yes, that sounds great,” said my dad.
One of my father’s hearing aids isn’t working right now.
The waiter looked at me, unsure what to do next so I pushed the list over to my father and repeated the question.
“He wants to know which of these beers you want,” I shouted so he could hear me above the pub hubbub.
The waiter bent over the table and put his finger at the bottom of the beer list. “These ones are dark,” he said, “and they get lighter as you go up.”
My father furrowed his brow as he studied the list. He finally pointed to the second beer from the top. “I’ll try this one,” he said.
When it was served, my father said, “That’s the right color.” He took a sip and pronounced it good.
I was glad he was happy with what he had ordered.
When my mother was early in her Alzheimer’s, I remember going to restaurants with her. She wasn’t hard of hearing, but she did struggle to order. She studied the menu, chose something, announced her choice to us, but then would have forgotten it by the time the server was taking her order.
Sometimes she ordered what the person before her had ordered.
Sometimes my father or I ordered for her or prompted her with what she had intended to order.
Drinks were a different story. When ordering drinks, she usually declined — which was fine. But when the server brought out drinks for people and brought nothing to her, she grew indignant.
“Where’s mine?” she would demand.
The flustered server would apologize and ask again what she would like.
We would offer our drinks to her.
Anything to make her happy.
Because the maxim, “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” is still true when Mama has dementia and is at a restaurant.
At the neurologist’s office one day, after a failed clock assessment, a sign of dementia, I asked the doctor, “What can I do? How can I help?”
He said, “Be patient. Be understanding. Be kind.”
We all need to live by those B’s, even without the presence of aging or hearing loss or fogged thinking.
So B is for beer.
And benevolence.
And the above-listed B’s.
Not just in restaurants, but everywhere — at home, in the store, at church, on the road, in political discourse.
My mother and father — when they really were going to a dance.
The day my mother got ready for the dance was a hard day in her dementia. She tried to dress in nicer clothes, but her fashion sense had gone awry and nothing really matched. Her lipstick looked garish. She perched on the arm of the wicker sofa, like a teenager would have, and kept glancing toward the driveway.
Occasionally, she would go out the sliding door and walk to the end of the driveway to peer down the road. Then she would come back to the house and wait.
It was a hot summer evening and I hoped she would grow tired of it or forget it or snap back to semi-normal.
“What are you doing, Mom?” I asked several times.
“I’m waiting to go to the dance,” she said, petulantly, with her chin at a teenager’s tilt. “They should be picking me up any time.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The others that are going.” These others never had names. These others never materialized.
Finally I offered to give her a ride. She gratefully accepted, not seeing the absurdity of her adult daughter giving her a ride to a high school dance. We drove into town and around the empty parking lot of the high school.
“See? There’s no one here, Mom,” I told her.
She just looked at the building with a blank expression.
So I drove around some more and finally ended up at my go-to for such situations — the local garden nursery. We got out of the car and walked around the greenhouse, admiring plants and forgetting dances.
My heart ached after that adventure.
A is for aging.
And Alzheimer’s.
And ache.
Not the ache that comes from working out. As an on-again/off-again fitness person, I know too well the ache of walking down the stairs the morning after doing squats and lunges for the first time in two years.
Not the ache the comes from putting off an appointment to the dentist.
Not the ache that comes from lack of sleep or forgetting your glasses or drinking too much wine the night before.
All these aches are temporary.
The ache of a caregiver is a heartache that has nothing to do with EKGs or echocardiograms.
It’s a soul ache because a loved one is vanishing, like a wisp of smoke that cannot be caught.
And when that loved one is finally gone, the ache remains, but it’s not getting stirred up anymore and aggravated by phantom dances.
It settles — like dust.
And we remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
As much as I loved my retreat at Laity Lodge, I love even more coming home. I am blessed with a family.
We’ve been looking through old pictures here. The photographs are needed for slide shows at milestone events. A wedding. A high school graduation.
Sometimes those years feel like a blur. We worked so hard. With so little sleep. It wasn’t always fun, but it was always good.
Here we are with four children. I ran out of hands at two. That’s why God invented backpacks and strollers.Five children. We would go to Myrtle Beach, driving through the night so the kids could sleep and not complain about the drive. It meant that Bud and I started every vacation exhausted. But it was always worth it.Six children. Five boys and one little girl. Family pictures were nearly impossible because of all the squirming.Eight children. Two girls at the end (shown here in the middle) to help even the score. Although it’s still not even. And I don’t believe in keeping score.I don’t ever want to take for granted this community of Zaengles.
But I also love that, in Isaiah, God addresses both the childless woman (Isaiah 55:1) and the eunuch (Isaiah 56:3-5), essentially the childless man. He promises them blessing beyond family.
Family is a rich blessing, but it’s not the only blessing. Blessings come in all shapes and sizes.
Mark Twain said, “Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.”
Thoreau said, “An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”
Joseph Addison said, “A contented mind is the greatest blessing that man can enjoy in this world.”
Euripides said, “Man has no blessing like a prudent friend.”
Walt Kelly said, “Every burden is a blessing.”
But then, Lou Gehrig — my favorite baseball player ever, in the greatest baseball speech ever, said, “When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body – it’s a blessing.”
Which brings me back to family – MY greatest blessing.
Flannery O’Connor said, “Grace must wound before it can heal.”
I scribbled those words in my notes during one Flannery O talk given by Dr. Ralph Wood at Laity Lodge.
If I can grasp that concept, I think I’ll be able to understand her writing more.
Jonathan Rogers looked at me during one session and said, “You don’t have to like Flannery O’Connor.”
I know. But I want to.
I really do.
I want to wrap my mind around this peacock-loving, slant-writing, perfect-word-choosing writer.
I want to be able to read one her stories where someone is gored by a bull or where a grandfather kills his granddaughter, I want to read one of those stories that leaves me feeling like I’ve been sucker-punched, and be able to say, “Ah, I’ve been wounded so that I can experience the grace of this story.”
Flannery O’Connor said, “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”
Yes, that’s it, Flannery. That’s me.
I see the hardness and hopelessness and brutality, and I miss the grace.
I said something to Jonathan about Judgement Day, the story that did me in on Flannery O. It’s the story of an old man from Georgia brought by his daughter to live with her in New York City. He wants to go home but dies in a horrible death in New York.
“I’m stuck with this image of a man with his head stuffed in the spokes of the railing. It’s an awful image,” I told him.
“Yes,” JR agreed, “but he got to go home.”
In the end the daughter brought her father’s body back to Georgia.
Was she the one wounded?
Was she the one who experienced grace?
See what I mean about not understanding Flannery?
And yet if grace were easy to understand, somehow it would seem cheaper.
So wound me, grace, so I can heal, and be more aware of the amazing power You hold.
Help me learn to extend that same grace, then, to others.
There’s just something about eggs. They make me think of her.
Not really.![IMG_6304[1]](https://hotdogsandmarmalade.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/img_63041.jpg)
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 