Yes. . . I was a very excited 20-year-old who was home in Philly on summer vacation when the Bicentennial rolled around. I had been looking forward to it all year. There was going to be time spent enjoying the 200-year celebration of our country in the city I called home. . . the city known as “The Birthplace of America”! Could there be any more special place to be?!? I had even put together a list of places to be and things to do on that magical weekend in 1976.
I got to thinking about my great expectations for that Bicentennial summer and how they were dashed in a moment while catching up on the schedule for this year’s 250th celebration of our nation. . .known as The Semiquincentennial. . . which I find hard to even pronounce.
My thoughts took me back to the disappointing and anger-inducing day of June 30th, 1976. I was working on the Adolescent Ward of a private psychiatric hospital for the summer. That Wednesday was the day that the schedule for next week’s staffing was posted. I quickly glanced at the schedule for the Adolescent Ward staff and saw that my name wasn’t on there for July 3, 4, or 5. Boom! Mission accomplished. I was free to celebrate freedom. I was especially excited to see a college friend from Western PA who was coming into Philly to help run the massive July 4th fireworks display. . . which her family, known globally as “the first family of pyrotechnics”, was going to put on. I was going to get a front-row seat!
For some reason, my eyes then shifted on the schedule to the Geriatric Ward staffing for the weekend. There was my name written in ink for the overnight shifts on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. I can’t remember if I appealed my case for freedom or not, but I didn’t get out of it. Making it extra difficult to swallow were the facts that 1) I had never filled in on the Geriatric Ward, and 2) I had never worked a night shift in my life! And so, I begrudgingly worked every night that weekend, while sleeping right through the days of celebration.
Earlier last week, I found myself telling this story to a friend who had asked me about what I did during the Bicentennial of 1976. I not only explained my still-simmering disdain at the scheduler, but I reminisced on how difficult it was to stay awake while a wing full of geriatric patients slept. I even shared how I felt inconvenienced when my exhausted self was asked to stay a couple of hours late on Sunday morning, July 4th, to tend to a 102-year-old dementia patient, Edna, who had absolutely no capacity to care for herself. That was something I had never done before either. I remember walking out in the sunshine after my shift, knowing that I was going to miss everything I had looked forward to. . . and I immediately went to bed.
Since that conversation earlier last week, my older and I hope more-mature self has been pondering what my 20-year-old self was thinking and feeling fifty years ago this week. In fact, I’ve had to even confess a kind of selfishness from that weekend that I had never really reckoned with before. Funny how those memories pop up in ways that force us to deal with them all these years later. I now have a 92-year-old mother who is under hospice care. . . and I know that there will be round-the-clock staff tending to her, as they always do, regardless of whether or not there is a holiday this weekend. Kindness and compassion to the hurting, diseased, and dying least-of-these among us can never take a vacation. I now realize that Christ-like selflessness will always battle with the selfish schedules our world convinces us to embrace and live. I look back with a “shame-on-me” attitude, hoping that the Divine-image-bearer named Edna couldn’t sense my attitude. Lord, forgive me.
In His kindness, grace, and mercy, the Lord had me recently read a related little punch-in-the-gut piece from Thomas Jay titled “Capital Suffering: On Bearing Crosses We’d Rather Not”, in the latest issue of Touchstone Magazine. I was reminded that in this world where things are not the way they’re supposed to be, we are called to be who we are supposed to be. Listen to what Thomas Jay has been learning as he cares for his ailing mother. . . lessons learned and perspective gained that I hope are mine as well. . .
Seeking distraction recently, I happened upon a short video of Angus Young, co-founder and lead guitarist of the rock band AC/DC, doing his version of Chuck Berry’s duckwalk across the stage before a cheering crowd in Berlin. Young is now old. Yet he and his bandmates are on the road again, perhaps hoping that not only rock-and-roll, but rock-and-rollers, too, will never die. But they will. It is the way of all flesh.
Still, I couldn’t help a metaphorical tip of the proverbial hat to the little fellow, his stringy white hair flying about as he played, yet again, the same old songs he’s been grinding out for decades, though the old fingers no longer scramble up and down the fretboard as fast as they once did. Like too many boys of the 1980s, I went through an adolescent AC/DC phase, assuming, no doubt like the boys in the band, that as long as the music was loud and fast there would be no end to youth and health and vigor. Nearing sixty now, I see the evidence everywhere: that trifecta of blessedness is waning.
Descending the Stairs
For the past two years, I have been caring for my elderly mother, watching her slowly disappear, physically and mentally, before my eyes. She is 90 and suffers from cancer and dementia. When I agreed to care for her, none of us thought she would still be with us two years hence. Her body has declined noticeably over the past six months. She is now under 80 pounds, cannot walk, and it’s become almost impossible for her to articulate coherent speech. Yet she lingers.
I am now more familiar with my mother’s frail, rickety body than either of us ever would have wished. John 21:18 is now our reality: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.” How humbling it must be to occupy a body falling apart slowly like a dilapidated house. Repairs are impossible but you must stay until the Landowner removes you from the property.
Early this year, when my mother’s condition declined a little further, the hospice nurse who visits weekly told me, “Just to let you know, this is the point where most people bail.” She explained that the decline from this point on would be like going down a flight of stairs. Flat, down, flat, down. More than once I have called out to God, imploring him, “How many more stairs? How much further will she (and I) have to descend?” Continue reading here.
Lord, save us from ourselves.