Beyond Hallmark Movies - Obeying the Fifth Commandment
The other day I opened an email from a friend who was two days into a five-day stint of helping her 90-year–old mother clean out her house. Her throat was closing up, she wrote, and tears were welling in her eyes, all over her mother’s insistence on keeping her stash of plastic bags, of all things. The writer of this email is one of the calmest, steadiest women I know–grounded and prayerful in a way that reflects in all her relationships. Yet helping her elderly mother clean out her house had brought her to the brink of breakdown. I jokingly replied that perhaps we should put our heads together and come up with a new course, the “spirituality”” of elder care.
The email brought back to me a complex wave of feelings that have faded in the two years since my own mother’s death. But for about seven years those feelings undergirded my entire emotional life. It was a muddled mix of frustration, guilt, and impatience along with a good dose of nostalgia for a person who once was but is no more–whose body is present although worn with age, but whose personality has morphed into something almost unrecognizable. Someone who might, for example, become obsessed with a stash of plastic bags.
To be clear, my mother never did, nor does my friend’s mother now, have alzheimer’s or any other real form of dementia. It’s just that they were and are not the mothers we knew when we were younger. I have numerous friends who have expressed their anger, a smidgen of resentment, and perhaps most of all their disappointment, that their elderly mothers are not the women they knew through their childhood and young adulthood. We ask each other, what happened?
I think for many of us who care for elderly parents, the truth is that even when our parents don’t have alzheimer’s, when there’s no dementia at all, they just don’t seem to be the people they were when they were our “real” parents, the ones who cooked our meals, paid the electric bill, and comforted us when we skinned our knees. And deep down we think, there’s no excuse for this. They can still do the New York Times crossword puzzle, can’t they?
In Hallmark movie versions of aging, the elderly become wise and calm, dispensing pearls of wisdom to their grandchildren who visit frequently. The adult grandchildren roll their eyes while smiling indulgently; then, later, they wonder aloud to friends and family members about how grandma can stay so cheerful, strong, and wise in the face of decrepitude. But this Hallmark movie version, a quaint depiction our cultural expectations, was not my experience, nor was it the experience of most of the people I know who have cared for their aging parents.
Perhaps the years I spent caring for my mother were made more challenging by contrast to her former self. She had been a great mother to us–my brother, sister, and I–when we were children. She took joy in her children, was attentive, kind, and patient. She was June Cleaver with an intellectual edge. She kept a great house, cooked wonderful meals, and made the best pie crust I have ever tasted. She took us to mass every Sunday, no matter where we were (my father’s job took us up and down the east coast), pinning Kleenexes to my and my sister’s heads when the little lace chapel veils were accidentally left at home. During the 1960s, she grounded us in a faith that provided stability and predictability when the images on TV were screaming instability. All this while fostering in me a love for literature, a penchant for good grammar, and a strong appetite for learning.
Throughout my teens and twenties, and later when I was a young parent, she was my go-to person when things went bad, always offering comfort, wisdom, and reassurance that she would always be there. She often did the same for my friends, whose parents weren’t as stable as she was.
When did the coin flip? When did I become the parent? By the time she was in her eighties and had moved into an assisted living facility a few miles from my house I was regularly scolding my mother like a child. I derided her about her poor diet, how much Pepto Bismal she was swigging between meals, about how it would be good for her to get out and play some bingo. It seems I spent most of my time in her company during those years gritting my teeth while she complained about her painful legs, the cold (always, she was cold!), and the food. We argued incessantly about the value and cost of generic versus brand name drugs. She became, in my mind, as petulant as a child about wanting to buy things she couldn’t afford. I would tell her in a deprecating manner that she didn’t need to start with her father dying when she was sixteen in reply to a doctor asking her about her medical history.
Now I realize that through the years that I was her primary caregiver, it was like I was trying to tell her she wasn’t doing old “right.” Wasn’t she was supposed to be wise, calm, and patient? Perhaps worst of all, I felt I knew—I somehow smugly knew—that when I was old I would certainly fit the Hallmark movie bill. I would be Yoda like—sage, contemplative, above the pitfall of constant complaining.
Respect and obedience for parents is such a foundation of Catholicism, and indeed of all Judeo Christian culture, that’s it’s literally carved in stone as one of the Commandments. I always assumed, “Honor thy father and mother,” was meant for children in catechism classes, so they would do as they are told. And that’s no doubt part of what God intended. But after my seven-year journey in elder care, I think perhaps the commandment was intended more for adult children caring for their aging parents.
The commandments, like most of the Bible, are terse, even cryptic. God leaves us to fill in the details and fit them to the circumstances of our lives. But there are other clues in the Bible about elder care. Written around 180 B.C., the Book of Sirach elaborates: “My son take care of your father when he is old;/grieve him not as long as he lives./Even if his mind fail, be considerate of him;/revile him not all the days of his life;/kindness to a father will not be forgotten,/firmly planted against the debt of your sins/–a house raised in justice to you.” Obviously, the struggles of elder care are nothing new. And, honestly, I can’t read that passage without getting a pit in my stomach knowing that my years of elder care, marked by a lack of compassion, patience, and understanding, will not be planted against the debt of my sins.
My mother’s mind never failed her until the very end. But her legs did, her arthritis cramped hands did, and her older, thinner skin that couldn’t keep the cold off her bones did. She never lost her senses, but neither did she lose her need to feel useful or the desire for the company of people under the age of 80. And by needing to be showered and dressed, sometimes by total strangers, she lost what was most important to her–her independence and dignity. Do I really know how Yoda-like I’ll be, or how strong my faith will be, when that happens to me?
Once toward the end, when my mother was in and out of consciousness, she grabbed my hand and held it with such ferocity that I knew she was filled with fear. She was literally holding on for dear life. It was a moment of intimacy with her I’ll never forget. It was like she was expressing to me what she couldn’t express in the years leading up to her death, when she was dependent on me. In that grasp, she was saying “getting old is scary, dying is scary.” Her faith was failing her. Why didn’t I see that before? I was too caught up in what I thought being old should be, and in my own resentment and disappointment. My compassion was clouded by my belief, indoctrinated in me by those Hallmark movie cultural expectations, that the elderly are beyond dark nights of the soul—that they are fearless, infinitely wise, stoic in their discomfort.
My experience with elder care was not the first time I have been betrayed by cultural expectations–idealized romances come to mind–but it was the most grievous time. Because it was an opportunity to learn how to take a situation as it is–as God gave it to me–and make it better for someone else–in this case for that someone else who made daily sacrifices for me when I was a child.
Maybe this is the very essence of sin. Missing the opportunity to love when you expected something different. Making a situation about what you wanted and not what God has given to you. The depths of the wisdom of the Fifth Commandment seems immeasurable to me now. It offers no elaboration, and no qualification. And just like the other nine commandments, it’s for adults as much, or maybe more, as it is for children. You break it at your own risk. Because now, in retrospect, the only person I’m disappointed in is myself.
