Where Two or More of You are Gathered in My Name...

Dede Eshleman

My mother suffers from short-term memory loss. This condition is not surprising as her own mother developed age onset dementia in her late 70s. So we were prepared when we noticed similar symptoms in my mom. Even so, coping with this condition is painful and frustrating for her and her loved ones. Thankfully, she now lives with my brother who cares for her. As my sister deals with the difficulties of mom's condition, she wonders if she will inherit this disease. She even told me, "If I don't know whether they are there or not..." and implied that it wouldn't really matter too much. I agreed with her sentiment...and then a beautiful thing happened that has me thinking differently.

My mom woke up around 11:30 pm on January 1st after having slept about 2 hours. I was reading in the living room at her house, with my 7 year old daughter asleep on the couch. When she came out of her bedroom, I asked, "Is everything okay, Mom?" She stated simply, "Daddy died."

"I know, Mom."

She continued, in that hurry-up voice of hers, "We have to get ready, they're coming."

"Okay, Mom," I said as I stood and walked toward her.

Then I did the only thing that seemed logical at the time. My mom wanted to get ready. Someone was coming. It was important to her to be ready when they arrived. She was scared and anxious, and she knew she needed to get ready. So together we went through the steps of getting ready: brushed her teeth, washed her face, brushed her hair, changed her into slacks and a pretty top, and put on her shoes. Then we sat on the couch to wait.

Then I held up a mirror to her actions and her feelings. I said, "Daddy died. You know you have things to do. You have to go to the hospital. You have things to take care of."

After nodding her head to all of these statements, she said, "Yes, I wish they would hurry up! Get here already."

"Yes, it is hard to wait. I hate waiting too." After waiting a bit longer I added, "Mom, I don't think anyone is going to come tonight. They aren't going to come tonight, because all those things that are important to do, you have already done them. Daddy died when Mary was a little girl. Look at her on the couch, she's pretty big now. When daddy died, you went to the hospital. We all did. You did all the things that needed to be done. We don't have to go and do those things now, because you already did them. Tonight we can just sit here, and we can tell stories about Daddy."

Once again, I held up a mirror to the feelings I guessed she was having. "You feel lonely without Daddy." She nodded her head and held my hand as I cried because I felt lonely without Daddy, too.

Then she added, "and empty and dead inside."

"Yeah," I said, "and empty. And you feel dead on the inside, but you're still living. And you're a little bit mad about that."

She nodded her head again.

"Yeah," I said. After a few minutes of looking out the window together, I said, "I'm glad you're alive, though, because I get to sit here with you and talk and remember how much Daddy loved all of us and how much we loved him." And as she nodded her head and squeezed my hand, somewhere in the middle of all this, I knew I was connected to my mom again even though she had this short term memory loss crap that gets in the way of everything.

My mom knew who she was. She knew she'd loved and had lost her love. In those moments she knew she loved her children. She talked about all of us by name and knew that we all loved her. She knew she loved the tearful me sitting next to her, and the kid sprawled out over there on the other couch.

After awhile I asked if she wanted to go back to bed, and she said, "Yeah, I do, I'm tired." After she was back in bed, glasses on her bedside table, I went back to the couch and my book and cried. Cried silent, deep, peaceful, happy-sad tears.

In the middle of her loneliness, in the middle of her emptiness, in the middle of that dead feeling inside her, we had connected again, we two. And Jesus' words floated in my head, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I will be in the midst of them." In the middle of the hurt and pain, we both had experienced God's healing presence...enough to rest in a peaceful sleep...enough to move on.