“I WOULD CRY WITH HER”

I want to tell you about one of my friends that I often visit in a nursing home here in Denton. Effie does not appear to be either old enough or feeble enough to be confined to a nursing home, but for whatever reason she is unable to negotiate life on “the outside.” In calling on such folk I search out entrees for conversation, such as encouraging them to talk about their youthful years, their marriage, their children, their life’s work, the people they remember. Recently when sitting with Effie, who has been in the home for awhile, I asked her a different kind of question.

“Effie,” I asked, “there is this woman that has just been placed here in the home. She is terribly fearful of being in a nursing home, something she has always dreaded. She resisted it to the end, but her children insisted that she is no longer able to care for herself. She is sitting there in the lounge like a wayfarer that has lost her way, her first day here. You have been here a long while and you might be able to help her. You go in and sit down beside her. What would you say to her?”

Effie is more articulate than most, and sometimes she is philosophical. She seems to be in control, and if people are ever content in a nursing home I would suppose her to be one of them. What would she say to a distraught newcomer, one destined to live out her days in an institutional environment, never again preparing her own meals, never again keeping her own home, never again driving her own car. She settles in, waiting to die. What do you say to one like that when the lights go out in her life? If anyone in the home had an answer it was Effie. She had been around and she knew how it was.

Did Effie ever lay one on me! She simply said, I would cry with her.

It wasn’t only what she said but the way she said it. I took it as an unintentional rebuke. Yes, she had been around and she did know how it was, and that was the truth she was laying on me: There are no speeches to make, no philosophizing to do, when the lights go out. She was saying to me what I was supposed to know, that there is a time when one can only weep. She was also telling me that I did not know what I thought I knew: what it is like to be confined to a nursing home. It is no simple matter, not even for her, and no easy answers.

I told Effie that I had spent my life with well-educated, sophisticated people, and that I had spent years in the greatest universities in the world, but that I had never heard such elegant wisdom as expressed in her five-word sentence, I would cry with her.

I left Effie a wiser man, calling on other friends in the home. There is John, an invalid confined to bed, who has been telling me for years that he wants to die. I tell him that he can live for God even in a nursing home, but he stills says he wants to die. We say the Lord’s prayer together, and I talk with him about the good old days when his wife was living (they had no children) and he worked his farm near Abilene, and taught a class of boys at the country church on Sundays. On this visit I reminded him that those boys in his old Sunday school class are now men out in the world on their own, and what he taught them all those years is now bearing fruit. “Isn’t that great, John, the influence you had on them! You’ve been a blessing to the world,” I said. But nothing comforts him like the thought of dying and going home, so we talk about that too.

John’s roommate is a black man, also named John, a diabetic who has lost both legs and is blind. He lies in bed, never moving until someone helps him. He recognizes my voice and expects a visit. I sit with him, hold his hand and talk about the Lord we both love. He joins me in saying the Lord’s prayer. I tell him that he will not be blind forever or an invalid forever, and that he will one day be whole again. He all but shouts, “Yes, Yes, Yes!”

David is another patient in the home who is not all that old, not quite 60 I would say, but he can’t quite cut it “out there,” so his sister, who is wife to a college professor and his guardian, placed him where he can be cared for. Life is tough for David. Smoking is his only refuge. He can have a cigarette only every half hour, and I see him shuffling his way to the smoking area at the appointed time. He tells me he can hardly wait for the next cigarette, looking at me helplessly, then at his watch. Ten minutes more to wait. He often says to me, “Leroy, I can’t stand it in here.” I tell him he will be all right and ask him once more about Jaqueline, his boyhood sweetheart and the only woman in his life. He calls her Jackie and tells me how pretty she was and how one night he kissed her. She married someone else long years ago. I see marks of lost greatness in David. On his better days we talk of poets and philosophers, and he occasionally reads articles in this journal.

Brooks, now plagued with Alzheimer’s and in a wheel chair, once had the responsible position of secretary for the City of Denton. His wife has placed a notice on the wall of his room asking the staff to take her husband often to the sitting room where he can be with others. But he only sits and stares, saying nothing. On this day I reminded him once more of how he helped Denton to grow into a sizable city, and how he once took me to Ft. Worth to make a speech to a gathering of city officials. “Remember, Brooks?” No response, only a stare. I patted his hand and moved on

I have read to Chris, a 17-year old quadriplegic, through several books over several years, including two volumes of Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. which he seems to have no problem understanding. At age seven he was injured in an automobile accident that killed both of his parents. He is unable to talk and has almost no use of his arms and legs. But he has a good mind, goes to school, and works a computer by way of head movements. He has a cheerful disposition. We talk about everything, such as the great cities of the world that I have visited, and how people in other nations live. He responds only with yes or no, head movements, and sometimes he communicates on his computer, which pronounces words he summons up. I tell him there are two worlds, this one and the next, and it is the next we are preparing for, and in that world everything will be made right—no wheel chairs, no nursing homes, no broken bodies. He is gleeful when I assure him he will one day run and leap and praise God, if not in this world then in the next.

Then there is Flo who is as old as she is childlike, and who says to me over and over, “Please take me home.” She hugs my neck and kisses my cheek, over and over again, saying, “You take me home?” We talk about the simplest things, such as what she remembers about her mother. Sometimes I just sit with her and hold her hand.

Now and again through the years I miss a David or a John or a Flo and make inquiry, only to learn that they had died a few days before. Maybe they are the fortunate ones. The others just sit and stare, or vegetate in their beds and wheelchairs, or shuffle about aimlessly. The abler ones do a little reading, watch TV, and gather every half-hour and silently send up billows of smoke as if in sacrifice to a god. Some sit in the lounge and watch the front door for someone to come to see them, but no one ever comes. They all have something significant in common. They are all waiting to die. And with what manner of hope only God knows.

Back in my car on that visit I thought of the wisdom of my uneducated friend Effie. What would she say, one who has been around and knows how it is, to a new arrival at the home? She would cry with her. I decided that I was not all that far from what Effie was trying to say. That is what I had been doing with my friends, each in a different way. I was crying with them, even if mostly with dry eyes. Sometimes that is about all one can do in our sinful, troubled world. It was sometimes all that Jesus could do or did do.—the Editor