Life is full of clubs. Some are the kind you choose, and you’re glad for the benefits they bring. Who doesn’t enjoy the special, shorter concession line at the movie theater because they’ve earned gold status? With great pride, we cinema elite can look down our noses at the commoners who will buy their Goobers five minutes later than we will.
But then there are the clubs you never signed up for, never wanted to join, and one day realize you’ve somehow become a member of anyway. The club I’m thinking of today is the one made up of people caring for aging parents. Once I entered it, I discovered more and more how many people in our church also belong to this sad and costly fellowship.
There are many things that make this one of the hardest clubs I’ve ever been in. First, it is a constant front-row seat to the suffering of someone you love. Suffering raises some of the deepest existential questions we have as human beings. It always seems pointless and there is a unique sting in watching suffering at the end of a long life. Yet there is gratitude if a parent even makes it to these years. My parents lived long, wonderful lives, while Alicia’s father passed away when she was a young girl.
My mother suffered from advanced Parkinson’s, along with debilitating pain from deterioration in her spine. It was an especially cruel combination: a bad back in a body that already shook and moved constantly. She endured many falls in the last years of her life. Part of the burden of caring for aging parents is seeing the phone ring from them and immediately wondering, “Who fell this time?” This past March she had two major falls within 24 hours, and those led to her passing. The cruelty of watching a loved one basically be beaten to death is still hard to stomach.
My father, on the other hand, is in remarkably good physical health despite being 94 years old. But he suffers from advanced dementia, and I do not really remember the last meaningful conversation I had with him. The windows of coherence grew smaller and smaller over the years until, at some point, they melted away like snow. Your loved one becomes someone you don’t really know anymore. It was a gut-wrenching moment the first time I had to physically restrain my father from leaving the hospital during a psychotic break brought on by mini strokes. He was one of the most non-contentious people I’ve ever known and standing eye-to-eye with him at 3 a.m. in the morning in a battle of the wills was one of my least favorite things I’ve ever had to do as a man.
He was a pastor for more than 60 years. I cannot count the number of times in the past year I have felt the ache of wishing I could talk to him about church and ministry. I would have loved his wisdom and advice. I’m sure he would have taken joy in my recent shift toward more preaching in my pastoral duties. I wish we could talk about that. Depending on what one believes about the intermediate state between death and final resurrection, it is strange to think that my mother likely knows what is going on with me, while my father does not. Sometimes you lose an aging parent who is still here.
Being in this club also means bearing a new responsibility for your parents’ lives. It is almost like parenting a teenager in reverse. A 16-year-old gets a license and newfound freedom, while those of us caring for aging parents know the painful moment when you have to take the car keys away. Wow…that is a hard conversation.
An 18-year-old moves away from home and gains a new autonomy, but with aging parents, there comes a point when you have to take that from them as they decline. They can no longer make wise decisions for themselves. You find yourself making more and more difficult choices and taking action to protect them from themselves.
The weight of that responsibility also comes with the reminder that you will carry it imperfectly. It is a maddening labyrinth of decisions: insurance, doctors, facilities. So often it feels like trying to choose the least awful option….and then you go and still choose an awful option.
This is a club that certainly does not promise neat and tidy endings. I’m reminded of a character in Harry Potter describing death as “slipping into a warm bath.” What a load of garbage. I have stood by the beds of friends and family as they died. It is vile, grotesque, and frankly angering. One thought always echoes in my head:
This is not how it should be.
At the tomb of Lazarus, there was no one else in the history of the cosmos who would have been more justified than Jesus to look around at the crowd, roll up his sleeves, and say, “Relax, everyone! I’m about to turn those frowns upside down!” He knew what he could do. The power He had over every molecule in the universe. He could have fixed it in less than the blink of an eye.
But he didn’t. We know what he did first: he wept.
And I am so thankful for that. So thankful that God breathed this into His word for us to receive. It stands as a deathblow to the stiff upper lip, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, put-on-a-brave-face facade we can put on. Sometimes the most Christlike thing we can do is weep.
John 11:33 “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the people who had come with her weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and greatly distressed.”
Jesus is the blueprint for lament. Human suffering, loss, and death moved Him. They greatly distressed Him. Not in a helpless, victim kind of way, but in a holy anger. In John 11, I love the NET translator’s note that says “He was angry because He found Himself face-to-face with the manifestations of Satan’s kingdom of evil. In that moment, death was standing there as the emblem of the enemy’s realm.”
To my fellow club members caring for a parent at the end of life: Jesus sees you as you seek to work out the fifth commandment in honoring your parents in their waning moments. He is oh so capable of sympathy and compassion toward us from rehab to hospice to graveside and every moment in between.
My story is just a sampling…so many of you have walked harder, more complex roads. It is a heavy task laboring in the trenches as the hands and feet of Christ, offering this last honor in defiance of the last enemy of Jesus. For the ones I know about and the many I don’t- I pray for the Holy Spirit’s comfort and sustaining power for you. Death does not have the final word for those whose faith is in Him who is continually angered and moved by our afflictions…with the power and authority to do something about it. An empty cross and tomb guarantees our club will be fully disbanded one day.