Liz's Lesson Learned: I Pray This Is Not What God Has For Me

I was asked to write about some aspect of my parents' lives that I did not want to become.  I thought and thought and thought some more.  And suddenly…

Wow, it was as if I was viewing my life with my parents through the lens of a whirlwind of vibrantly colorful events.  So many memories, so emotional, yet so enjoyable, I don’t want to get off the ride.  I had two of the best parents.  I could not imagine my life without them guiding, nurturing, admonishing, loving, encouraging, teaching, and sacrificing for me.  It wasn’t easy for me to come up with the part of my parents I was most afraid of becoming, but I continued to try.  So, I got back on that whirlwind and let short memories flash.

My parents retired from the Pentagon after years of dedicated service.  They were faithful people who attended and participated in church.  The way they loved and raised the six of us inspired me.  When I began raising my children, I followed my parents’ example.

As a family, we travelled.  We celebrated Christmas and spent quality time with our extended family.  Their deaths were a huge loss for me.  Though they both died from illnesses that took a toll on their minds and mobility, I continue to remember the way they looked as healthy, vibrant, happy, loving people.  Dad played catch with us and watched sports with us.  Mom taught us how to bake and cook. They both helped us study and took us to church.

  We saw Mom and Dad dance the stroll and the twist.  While cleaning the house, we sang and twisted the night away to Sam Cooke.  We ate at a dining room table that seated eight.  The eight of us played board games. We would all gather to watch TV and attend church.  We went to ride the Atlantic City waves.  We took turns on the ever-ringing yellow phone that hung on the kitchen wall, but whose cord would stretch across the kitchen and out the kitchen door into the dining room, almost over to the living room without breaking. 

My mom pressed our hair and taught us how to iron our clothes. She could play the piano and sing. She played for our family singing group.  She could debate scripture with the best of them.  She listened to all my woes and took pride in my achievements.  I talked to her three or four times a day. I just loved sitting at her feet when she and other friends and relatives would talk about life.  She may not have walked fast, but she did walk around and up and down the steps of our three-storied home.

My dad was very athletic and was well known and liked in Washington, DC. He drove us around and took us on long walks.  We happily jumped in the car and visited New York, Philadelphia, North Carolina & South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, and Oklahoma.  On our romps all over the United States, Dad would do most of the driving. 

Man, Dad was an information specialist who had a wonderful bass voice.  He worked hard to take care of his family.  My Dad is the type of man I wanted to marry someday.

There were so many more smiles and laughs than frowns that whirled through my mind.  Our parents were the glue that held us together. 

But then the whirlwind slowed, and the images began to change, and I remembered…

In 1987, my dad’s health began to deteriorate.  The man who once walked miles to work and to friends’ homes, swinging a baseball bat with amazing strength, began to slow down.  His memory began to fade.  Day by day, things that were once easy for him became difficult. The very capable man who used to fix us meals had to stop cooking because, mid-movement, he would forget what he was doing and would burn something.

He would wander off, and we would not know where he was.  God still shone on our family because the neighborhood families knew him for blocks and blocks. 

He would go down to the corner store and run up a tab that my Mom would pay.  The storeowner knew our family and knew he was good for anything man Dad brought home.  Though my Mom was concerned, she took some comfort knowing that someone would guide him home if he got lost. 

He went from visiting his friends to my Mom asking his friends to come to the house and help with his grooming, keep him company, and give her peace, because he could get cantankerous at times.  His well-muscled, trim body and his extremely handsome caramel-toned face became gaunt and scraggly.  His hazel once full of life eyes became sunken in. 

His once well-kept beard began to give him a scruffy, ailing look.  While he always knew who we were, he began to forget other things, and he smiled less.  For quite a while, he thought he was doing well and would continue to drive his car.  Then it all came together for him one day when he went off driving.  My mom had been trying to get him to stop driving, but sometimes he would still get away and go off on his own.

On this one day, I remember my mom calling around to friends and relatives to see if they had seen him.  No one had.  It must have been summertime because I remember a lot of the angst occurred during daylight hours.  My mom called the police.  She told them the type of car he was driving.  It seemed like hours passed by before we watched a couple of police officers leading my father down the three steps that were flanked on either side by green hedges and led to the sidewalk, going to the porch and up the porch into our home.  The police officers said they found him in Alexandria, VA.  He was extremely disoriented and said he couldn’t remember how to get home.  They said his driver’s license told them where to come.  My mom thanked the officers profusely.

As the police officers left, my father didn’t say a word.  He simply walked over to our hardwood dining room table and placed the keys there, and he never drove the car again.

Many days, I sat in the hospital as he slowly lost more and more of himself to a rare illness that the medical world had not been able to totally understand.  And my wonderful father, who used to feed me, sat and barely ate the food that I fed him.  And then one day in December of 1989, he was gone. My father died from complications of Alzheimer’s at the age of 65.

When my Dad passed, my mother was 58 years old.  It was thirty-one years after my Dad left us, and I never knew her to date again. 

And then in the late 90s she began to slow.  As the years progressed, it became more and more difficult for her to go up and down stairs.  Her gait slowed even more.  A family decision was made to remodel her home so that she would no longer have to go up and down stairs.  Her mind remained sharp, and she could still play Scrabble with the best of them, as well as play the piano.  We still travelled but took care to make it comfortable for her to do so. She went from walking under her own steam to walking with a cane.  Gradually, she went from walking with that cane to often needing a walker.  We watched her life change as she went from rarely using a walker to needing to push that walker ahead of her everywhere she went. 

She began to lose her balance and fall down. She had to hold onto one of us to get out of the house, down the stoop, up the sidewalk, and three steps to the car.  When she could no longer walk by herself to visit her neighbors, one of us would support her and walk with her. 

My oldest brother and I drove her to Oklahoma to attend one of her and my Dad’s long-time family friends’ 50th wedding anniversary.  My mom was using a walker by then.  There was a ramp to get up to the floor where the festivities occurred.  On the way in, my brother and I helped her.  She was in such good spirits, feeling good after having a wonderful time catching up.  We left and headed to the ramp.  My brother went to pull the car up in front.  As my Mom and I began slowly walking down the ramp, she lost her balance and fell headfirst.  I was able to help her turn on her back.  However, I tried with all my might to help her get back up on her feet.  I could not muster up enough strength.  So, I sat there on that hard concrete and held my Mom until my brother arrived with the car.  I guess he realized something was wrong because we were not waiting on the sidewalk at the bottom of the ramp when he drove up.  I saw him run up that ramp and quickly jump into action. With him lending the muscle, we were able to get my Mother up and help her to the car.

Then one day, when she was maybe 75, she began to need a wheelchair.  At first, she used the walker and the wheelchair.  But as with her other mobility progressions, she, all too soon, moved to needing the wheelchair to get around.  At first, she could wheel it on her own, then the time came when we had to wheel her and lift her in the wheelchair.  Like my Dad, she came to a point where she needed us to help keep her mobile.  All too soon, she didn’t leave the house, and the time would not leave her bedroom much at all. 

I watched my mom begin to forget things and repeat herself several times in a small space of time.  But I still held hope that she had many years of life to live.  Then, just as it was with my Dad, it became obvious that she was declining.  She still remembered us and her family.  She would light up when her deacon from or her sisters called or stopped by. 

Aside from the slender, fashionable woman captured in photos, the Mom I knew was a deep chocolate, robust, fun-loving, intelligent woman who liked beautiful things but lived modestly.  As age took its toll, her body weight began to drop. Her mind would just not help her keep her balance, and she would fall.  Even when we thought she was steady, she would fall.  The last time she fell, she really bruised her face and had to be hospitalized.  She came home from the hospital to live with me and my husband, our son, and my oldest granddaughter.  That year was 2020.  We cared for her as she continued to slow down.  She was bedridden.  She no longer talked in a way that we could understand. 

To provide familiar comfort, I played music from her era that I knew she loved.  For example, the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Kenny Rogers, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Mahalia Jackson filled her room 24 hours a day.  She would grunt and moan, and I knew she was singing along with the songs she loved.  My granddaughter slept on the floor in her room so that she would be there with her when I retired for the night.  My son put off plans to move so he could be there with me to help bathe, turn, feed, and keep her company.  My husband would come and help any time I asked him.  We kept her company during those last months of her life when she lived with us.

In May of 2020, I knew her time was nearing. I was now feeding her the purified meals that hospice care brought to the house each week.  I was bathing the woman who bathed me and my siblings, her grandchildren, and my father.  She no longer moved from her bed and needed to be turned to keep down the threatening bed sores that accompany immobility.

At just three months before her 89^th birthday, she uttered one more hoarse question/sentence that I clearly understood: “I can go and be with Jesus now?”

I replied yes, and the next day, I turned from my desk that was in her room and heard her make a last deep guttural sound, and the final breath escaped her lips.  And the wonderful woman I called Mom died.

….

At 65 and after being blessed with a wonderful, well-rounded life, supported and inspired by my extraordinary parents, there is not much that I would not love to emulate from their lives.  But if I must make a choice, then I will say that it is the transfiguration of their bodies and minds that I least want to become. 

So, with deep love and respect for my parents and the lives they showed and gave us, I humbly pray that just this minuscule aspect of all they were to me is not what God has for me.