My mother is losing her mind.

My mother is losing her mind. Day by day in the gradual progression of time and in the most gentle way, her thoughts and awareness are slipping away. She doesn’t seem to realize it, or even mind too much when it occurs to her that she doesn’t remember something that she probably should – like what her house looks like, or where to find her room at my house where she is living now. “What day is it?” she’ll ask many times every day; and it is always new information when I tell her.
We’re functioning pretty well right now at our house. She is cared for much better than she remembered to care for herself in the last year that she was living alone, and my husband and I are able to maintain much of our former life and schedule before she came. But no one knows how long that will be so. She will one day, maybe soon, need someone with her all the time, and we will have to decide what adjustments to make to our lives in response.
And through this journey, that we’ve really just begun, God has been a faithful provider and instructor. My prayer is that I will be as faithful and attentive a student for these lessons of love. I’m learning to live in each moment as if it were new and to be appreciated as such, because that’s what she does. My tendency, like that of most people, is to wish things were different or to try to change or reject what I don’t like around me. The inconvenience of circumstance can be so frustrating. But it’s usually the inconvenience of circumstance that makes me realize my own selfishness and that I have failed to see the blessing and ease I was living in before this. My prayer is that my response to the inconvenience of these circumstances will not be to rebel or resent where I am or blame others for putting me there, but that I will understand the importance of these days and the value of how they can shape me.
Are these lessons in submission to circumstance for me alone, or will I be called to teach them to others? I cannot know at this point. Perhaps even asking the question reveals more selfishness on my part, when the truth may be that the focus is God’s care for my mother, and I am the available tool.
Whatever God’s purpose in these days, He has offered me grace for the taking – new every morning. I am watching the enactment of Jesus’ words to live for this day without worry for the next. I am hearing the echoes of the ceaseless praise in heaven of repeated “Holy, holy, holy” when I hear repeated again and again my mother’s reminiscences of the same events from long ago or from the moment before.
The wisdom my mother offers me these days is often not even in her awareness, but in mine. As I was the beneficiary of her care throughout my life, I continue to be beneficiary of what I learn when I care for her. Frustration? Tedium? Impatience? They live with me too, but what a gentle teacher I have to make them a sacrificial offering – more valuable because it is hard to give.