by Kevin Burton
In a nursing home there is life and there is death. Both are palpable, as ever before. But in all our salad days, we didn’t notice.
We were young, we were strong, energetic and smart. We were even hip, and sophisticated – well not quite sophisticated – but surely driving that highway to wherever we wanted to go.
And we were on our way. We were on our way fast. Couldn’t be slowed, couldn’t be challenged, couldn’t be touched.
That which is palpable, life and death or whatever else, still is not felt, until and unless you actually touch it.
In a nursing home you touch what you never acknowledged before, and it touches you. You feel it. Your hours are long, even as your time is short.
There are young medical workers, professional yes and there to help, but on their way to some other place, as an RN in a hospital perhaps, with better pay and better hours. They are driving their highways too. They are probably underpaid and certainly overworked. And they are human.
The astronaut knows the high-tech rocket he needs for return to mother earth, was built by the lowest bidder. Similarly, pray for those young workers who are giving meds and food and comfort to the older generations, perhaps to someone you know and love, and to my mother.
I sit on a chair on a Thursday like yesterday and I am straining to hear what my mother says. I am straining because her words are precious. They could contain our shared history, or her needs of the moment, or the joys of a simple accomplishment. An exercise of hands or legs, to maintain abilities that before were taken for granted.
I strain because she doesn’t project her voice the way she used to. The way I remember from Bermuda and Ohio and the other places.
In a nursing home there are stories to be told and to be heard. There are lessons to impart and to be absorbed. And I wonder, up the hallway, who is straining to hear the accumulated wisdom – or even the folly – of all the others? Those former caretakers of America, now riding their wheelchairs, slowly, painfully. Anybody?
I am qualified to ask such questions because I am of age now. I am 61, and this week I will finish paying for her burial plot, according to the discussion mom and I had, just as I bought her a popcorn popper for Christmas, whatever year that was, because this is what love does.
I am 61, but leaning forward in my chair I am also 5, listening for clues, little nuggets that might unlock the secrets of a confusing world. In that half century it has become a deeply disappointing world. As our eyes meet, neither of us denies that.
But God help us both if we do not acknowledge the multitude of blessings we have been granted over the years and continue to enjoy to this day.
Life doesn’t hold all the promise it did before. One by one life’s illusions have burst, like so many bubbles, and vanished into the silent mist. We see through all that now. But death, the death we forced from our consciousness before, doesn’t hold the threat it used to hold.
We hate the very idea of the nursing home because we know it’s the last earthly stop. The nursing home is the place where you absolutely have to come to terms with death, intellectually and emotionally.
That’s why the day I walked into my mother’s assisted living facility to tell her I had made the decision to move her to a nursing home, I asked for her blessing. If she had gone kicking and screaming it would have destroyed me, even though I know it was the right thing to do – really the only move we had open to us as a family.
That was a tough moment. But praise be to God, my mother was saved in 1977 and largely through her example, I was saved a few years after that.
That’s why as I choke back tears as I write this post and as I walk these last miles with her, there is hope. This hope is a glorious hope of an eternity spent together in a Heaven we can’t fully understand now but we know is God perfect place for us.
In a nursing home, because of Jesus, there is freedom.
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