With the conference behind us there is one more major undertaking this summer – the trip to WI. For years, as we criss-crossed the country moving from one military base to another, WI was like Mecca for us. It was where we launched from and where we continued to return. As years have passed this is less because of geography and more because this is where Gram is and she can no longer come to us.

My grandmother has always been the matriarch of our family. The sun rose and set around Gram as far as we were concerned though she never demanded that position. Perhaps because she never demanded it, that adoration has been given freely and generously all these years. It has been tricky to maintain that position of honor and authority as she has aged and become more physically compromised. I think my mother and her sisters have done a phenomenal job in that respect. Gram, too, has accepted the help offered to her in a remarkably dignified manner.

An old friend of mine finds herself in my shoes these days. We are thousands of miles away from ‘home’ and the most important decisions about these women we love are being made with minimal input from us. Both of our grandmothers are struggling to remain in their homes as long as possible and both are now in varying degrees of dependence upon others for their most basic needs to be met. It is interesting to see what this brings out in the people around them. Her brother’s solution to the problem of Grandma wishing to remain at home, but no longer being 100% self-reliant, is to offer her a bleak scenario of either hightailing it to his neck of the woods or suffering a rapid decline leading to a nursing home. He figured the scare tactics would force her hand. : /

We can do better than this. We must.

When I was very little my mother enrolled me in a Catholic preschool.  It was more than a preschool really. There was care for two year olds through a full kindergarten. That is less remarkable than the other aspect of the sisters’ vocation however. On the third floor of the building was their nursing home. Sisters no longer able to work in the order were lovingly cared for much like Tomie De Paola describes in Nana Upstairs, Nana Downstairs. Like Tomie, I visited the sisters regularly. We performed little impromptu plays for our captive audience and brought them soup and scribbled artwork. Like Tomie I don’t recall ever being frightened or off put by thinning hair or missing teeth. I loved visiting ‘upstairs’. It was a vital, connected, sane part of my life and hopefully it was an early and permanent lesson in how to respond to the problem of aging.

I suspect most of us don’t mean to become insufferably bossy and tyrannical towards our elders. It probably has more to do with the role we find ourselves filling at the moment when our older relatives are becoming more dependent. Usually it coincides with having small children to care for and it is easy to lump them all into one bunch whom we consider to be sorely in need of our direction – like it or not. If we have a basically respectful attitude towards our children it goes a long way towards also respecting the dignity of our elders. If not, boy, it all goes south and it truly IS heck to be old. Or young. Or disabled.

Colin, our parapalegic son, is teaching us how to navigate this fine line of knowing when to help and when to step back, when to work behind the scenes and when to allow people you love to call their own shots, even if that means they do things we could, perhaps, do better for them. We have had a lot of practice with this, having had small children in the house for two decades now. The first thing little people tend to express to us is a desire to do for themselves. This drive towards independence is the last thing we relinguish in this world. I hope we are learning how to enable those we love to hang onto it as long as possible. It is not easy. It is not more efficient. It is still the right thing to do.

We try to meet our the needs of those we love in ways that respect their dignity. We encourage them make all the decisions they safely can and, when called upon to help, we offer choices versus calling the shots. We try not to feed our own egos. We try to keep our agenda out of the mix. Its not easy. Its certainly not efficient. Whether it is a two year old wrestling with a buttonhole, an 87yo struggling to write a check, or a young man in a wheelchair loading his purchases at the checkout, you stand back. You give no hint that you could do it better. You learn there are many ways to get a job done and the faster way is not always the better way.  In fact I suspect there is a lot to learn by slowing down whether for young or old or in between. In our quest for efficiency and ease we lose sight of that.

Our value is not tied to our independence. As Christians we should likely know better anyway. Jesus was strongest when He became weak. Christ – as a child in the manger and nailed to the cross – is the very image of dependence. There were two responses among those who encountered Him both places – reverence and hostility. Every time we are faced with human frailty we, too, get to decide how we will respond. My fondest wish is that all we do here, from bottle feeding kittens to returning tiny fledgings to the nest to finger painting cards to Grandmas, is in some way nurturing that reverence and reminding the children that we reap as we sow, therefore we sow kindness.

So anyway, it is that time again. I will be packing up some of the children next week and trekking across the plains to spend a few more days at the feet of a woman I have looked up to my whole life. She has modeled gracious living and now truthfully she is modeling gracious dying. I hope we can continue to offer her the same restrained, respectful assistance she has always offered to us.