Fay – “I wish my son would come, I’m so lonesome. Who am I to talk to? I don’t hear from my son . . . I don’t see any of my family – it’s unbelievable. I just sit here.”Ida – “At least I’m not bothering people. . . now I’m doing nothing and I should be doing something.”
Interviewer – “what would you like to do here?”
Ida – “Be with people. . . The last years are not good. It’s good that I can think back and see faces in my mind. If I didn’t have that I’d go crazy.”
Fay – “I wish I was dead.”
Ida – “when you’re married to a man and you realize that you are his life, you don’t want anything else after that. . . After he died I saw a change in myself. My body changed, I changed – he was one wonderful guy. I was the luckiest woman and then he left me. God took him away. I don’t know how I did it. Where do the years go?”
Claire – “My daughter never had time for me.”
Tori and I watched a documentary on TVO last night called Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company, an actuality drama by Alan King. It showed life in a Toronto nursing home and how some of the residents were coping with old age.
We sat for 2 hrs watching. I cried a lot of the time. My heart just broke for each of the “characters” as they shared their pain and lost their memories. I’ve always had a tender heart for the elderly. I remember visiting a nursing home when I was a Brownie and for weeks just crying at night because I felt so sad for those “old” people. Also when I was working at the tea room, I encountered a lot of elderly widows. I found myself very drawn to them, in that I wanted to help. Their loneliness was so apparent. As a result I have involved myself in Mrs. Chrisitie's widows ministry because there is a desperate need for some sort of community for those ladies, a lot of whom are not saved and seem to be grasping for hope.
That documentary last night really reiterated the loneliness in the elderly that has always been so apparent to me. As I was watching I felt an urge to head over to the nursing home down the street, sit down with a lonely elderly person and just listen to them in an effort to if only for a moment help them forget their loneliness. But as I walked in the door last night, I noticed my grandma’s cane and I suddenly remembered her desperate plea for me not to leave her .
How is it that it so often takes the voice of a complete stranger to make me realize what is beneath my nose (in this case a documentary)? Why doesn’t my heart break for my grandma as it did for Claire, Ida, Max and the others from that film? Why is it so easy for me to ignore her loneliness and frustration? Why am I constantly rolling my eyes when she claims that she wants to die, yet wept for the lady who said exactly that in the film last night?
The words of those people rang so true. My grandma is so similar – wanting to die, being lonely, changing so much after my grandpa died.
Who am I fooling? The loneliness of the elderly has not been apparent to me at all, and when it has been I’ve flat out ignored it. I don’t need to go down the street to listen to a person in the nursing home; I need to pay attention to the loneliness of a woman who lives under the same roof as me.
What was it that I heard a couple of months ago? Something like, service starts in your own home. I’ve been failing miserably, consumed by my own selfishness, deliberately ignoring the pain that comes from aging. Maybe I just don’t want to see my grandma that way. She was always such a vibrant, energetic, strong lady who wore her heart on her sleeve. Now she’s just miserable and I know it’s her loneliness. No matter how much time we spend with her she’ll never get over the loneliness of losing her husband, but sometimes I think by leaving her out of my life I make her feel more lonely.
Before I go anywhere she needs to understand that when I leave it won’t be an attack on her. What I so desperately need her to know is how much of a legacy she has left in my life. In many ways she has influenced who I am. She has always been a model of love, self sacrifice, and strength for me.
I think it’s time for me to start modeling some of the very things that she has taught me - not at the nursing home down the street, but here at home.
But if she (a widow) has children or grandchildren, their first responsibility is to show godliness at home and repay their parents by taking care of them. This is something that pleases God very much.
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