It’s so hard when your parents or another loved one gets to the point where they just can’t live on their own anymore, isn’t it? Tough decisions need to be made: Should we have them move in with us or should we try and find a good safe home for them to move into?
As I recently completed a group of posts on the events leading up to my earthly dad’s death (see series starting with Dad), I won’t go into him any further at this point. However our mother was still alive, and if you remember any of my recent posts (i.e. Trying to Save Mom), you’ll remember that there were times when it was beyond difficult to deal with her.
Mother had been falling more and more in her apartment, and my sister and I were stressing about her having no one around to help her. She refused to wear any sort of monitoring system, declaring that she knew she didn’t need it. We couldn’t force her, so we had to let it drop.
However my sister and I also knew that it would be catastrophic for her to live in either of our homes because of her demanding attitude. So the only option was to find a residence home where monitoring would be available “just in case,” but otherwise she was free to live and do whatever she pleased as she would have her own apartment.
The problem? She hated every one we took her to…
She would come close to signing the paperwork, but then decide against it. We felt like we were on a continual roller-coaster, and our nerves were shot with the stress of trying to do the right thing, but somehow failing every time we turned around.
Then one day out of the blue mother called me on the phone to let me know that she had visited a new residence home on her own, loved it, and had plopped down the funds needed to get moved in! However I found it very interesting that I had driven by this home previously on my own, and was POSITIVE that mother would hate it – so never mentioned it to her!
Moving day arrived, and … well … never mind – I don’t even want to go there. Suffice it to say it wasn’t a fun day…
However a couple days after she’d moved in, we were excited to see more of our “old” mom coming through – she was active, making friends, and just seemed generally more happy – hurray!
About a week passed by blissfully, and then – oh, oh, mother had flipped back to her worst again. When I spoke to her on the phone she was whiny, said she hated it there, was lonely (huh?), and she now knew she’d made a HUGE mistake. Well too late now…
However, God had a few surprises waiting for us. A few days later my sister and I went over there for our weekly get-together as mother wanted us to be her guests for dinner in the official dining room. We were both dreading it, because she had a bad habit of being rude to people serving her. However we knew we needed to go.
After dinner my sister had to leave, so I decided to stay a little longer and went with her into another area to have coffee by a fireplace. We found our spot, and then a sweet lady I had met briefly on another occasion came and joined us. Her name: Anna.
I had just asked mother whether she wanted to attend church with us again since Easter was around the corner (Oh, Yeah – Nothing Slips By Our God!), but she started making excuses, as usual. But then –
Anna decides to start asking mom how she felt about God. Mother told her she didn’t feel you needed to attend church to be a “good Christian,” and Anna said she disagreed! Then she went onto say how she believed in the Trinity, and I could tell by the glazed look on mother’s face that this was going right over her head. No matter – I was so excited that I just sat there and watched how it was going to all play out.
Mother finally had heard enough, so she made an excuse and left the room. This gave me a brief moment alone with Anna, so I asked her to please keep mother in her prayers. Anna nodded. Yahoo – I was pumped up!
Little did we know what was coming around the corner. More to come…
The God Of All Comfort 