A year ago

This time last year my family was keeping vigil at the bedside of my father as he entered his last days. It was a very difficult time. I had spent many hours with other families on this journey, but now it was my family and my father who were living this reality. This week I find myself back in that pain of letting go and revisiting the feelings that were surfaciong for me. I loved my father deeply and I was loved by him. But the disease that marked the final years of his life was to affect us all. Alzheimer's is a burden for the whole family to endure.

Today, I was reading the blog of a priest friend of mine, Fr Stephen Wang. He quoted this, which has given me a new perspective on thiose days.

"Yesterday, after an emergency call at the nursing home, I was about to exit when I noticed a man in the hallway. He was sitting next to a woman in a wheelchair, tenderly holding her hands. Not a word was spoken. He just sat there, looking intently into her eyes. I walked over and engaged him in conversation:

“Your wife, I take it?”

“That’s right, of forty-seven years.”

“Do you visit her often?”

“Every single day. Haven’t missed a day in four years, except for that blizzard last year.”

“She’s not saying anything.”

“That’s right. Hasn’t been able to for the last eighteen months – ever since her stroke. She has Alzheimer’s too.”

“Alzheimer’s! Does she know who you are?”

“Not really. But that doesn’t matter. I now who she is.”

[From Stephen Rossetti's Born of the Eucharist: A Spirituality for Priests pp. 101-102]