Category Archives: Caring

Jan identifies with her mother so much that…

01 Thursday Oct 2015

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dock at sunset

Three and a half weeks after her mother fell and broke her neck, nose, and three other compression fractures in her back, as well as badly bruised her face, her mother continues in therapy and in the care of staff in a nursing home. Jan spent twelve nights in all with her mother, attempting to work out the challenges of pain-relief and sleeping medications, staff responses, and keeping her neck brace in position without her mother removing it. Finally, a tentative stability achieved, Jan returned to her own life and got some rest.

One night her mother had spent several hours preparing for her first grade class of school children, identifying their individual needs, and strategizing how to meet those needs. Of course she retired nearly twenty-five years ago, but she had taught for more years than that, and it is easy for her mind to return to those years, even as she also slips back into the early years of motherhood, or childhood with her own mother. Jan could easily identify with each stage of her mother’s concerns.

Jan was nearly caught up with her rest, as we travelled to Lincoln, Nebraska, for an enjoyable day with Granddaughter Willow, a trip that we had postponed because of Mother’s needs. On the way back, we stopped at one of Missouri’s remaining rest areas. Gary took the Nguy family beagle, Odette, into the pet walking area. Odette had stayed with Willow for six weeks but worn out her welcome with her persistent demand to be outside when Willow needed to study. We volunteered to take Odette back to O’Fallon. Jan sat in the car, finishing a phone conversation.

When Jan got out to walk to the rest station, her toe caught on a parking barrier, and she fell face-first onto a concrete curb. Her face was bloodied, scraped, and bruised, but her glasses somehow escaped with just a bend in an earpiece. Gary came running when he saw Jan lying flat, put Odette in the car, and checked Jan out. She was bleeding profusely, but the two small facial cuts were closing quickly with pressure. Her nose was pouring, so we used Jan’s tried and true method of a small compress under her upper lip, and it began to slow, and finally stopped after five minutes.

A rest area worker came quickly when she saw us on the ground. She was so focused on Jan’s visible injuries that she stepped on the glasses, but she was so eager to be helpful that we could not fault her. A pediatrician and his wife were next to help. The doctor admitted that Jan was older than his usual patients, but the injuries looked familiar. He checked her over, said that one stitch or a butterfly bandage might be useful, made sure that she was not feeling pain anywhere else that might indicate a break, and discussed what to watch for in concussion symptoms, which were not appearing—no headache, vision or dilation effects, or confusion. The rest area worker helped Jan into the restroom to get cleaned up.

We made stops at Walgreens and CVS forty minutes later to get bandages, antibiotic cream, and antiseptics. We passed four hospital signs during the rest of the trip, checking with each other about the advisability of stopping, but we arrived at O’Fallon six hours later.

Jan had copied her mother’s accident, in facial injuries, but not in broken bones, fortunately. She had two seriously black eyes and a nasty abrasion on her forehead to alarm and impress Alicia, Au, and Symphony. Alicia had fallen down her stairway a few years ago and seriously damaged her knee. Jan could easily identify with her mother and her daughter in an even more intimate respect.

Waste of a good mind

28 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in Caring, Events, Faith, Growing up, Gullibility, People, Small town life

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A new teacher but already a middle-aged man, Mr. Vickers introduced himself to his first chemistry class at Paxton Community High School, “My first name is Mister.” He was always quite formal, organized, and meticulous, and he proved to be an excellent instructor in chemistry and physics. His instructions were orderly and systematic. If we did our part, we had no excuse not to learn in his classes. I was pleased when he offered me an opportunity to take part in a special summer class for prospective science majors at Northwestern University after my junior year in high school. That was the summer I also took advantage of an opportunity to acquire a Methodist License to Preach though the Illinois Wesleyan University licensing school.

Mr. Vickers did not have much use for religion. He did not reveal this through disparaging words, and we as students never heard him say what experiences had led him away from the involvements in religious organizations that typified many of his teaching colleagues in that community. He did not know that my thoughts about the future were divided between pursuing studies in science or religion. At the end of that summer someone must have told him of my divided interests.

Not long after the beginning of school that fall, Mr. Vickers interrupted class to invite me into the hallway. I was apprehensive that I had done something wrong. His manner was usually sober and severe, so there were no clues that his interest was paternal. He explained that he had been disappointed to learn that I was thinking about a career in Christian ministry. “That would be a waste of a good mind,” he said. He had several other things to say about it that I have forgotten, but that sentence stuck in my thoughts.

My pastor at the time, Glen Sims, was a learned and compassionate man. Without his example of an intelligent person serving courageously and usefully in that community, Mr. Vickers might have been more persuasive. As it was, I knew that Mr. Vickers sincerely cared about me and my future, and he gave me a preview of challenges to come.

Mr. Jones, the speech teacher, soon added another viewpoint. Public speaking was a much more uncomfortable subject for me than chemistry or physics. You have to be able to cry on cue, if you’re going to be a preacher, Mr. Jones said in words to that effect. Preachers appeal to the emotions, not to the intelligence, according to Mr. Jones. Mr. Barth, the English teacher, also added his advice. His brother was a Lutheran minister, he said, and it’s not an easy life. You have too rosy a picture of it as a career. You have to be prepared to be lonely. People have many unrealistic expectations of the clergy.

The advice began to accumulate. Most other career choices were not subject to such interest. Just about everyone had an opinion about religious vocations. Mr. Vicker’s advice stood out among the rest. I heard him say to me that I had a good mind. That was a source of pride. I also heard him issue the challenge, “Do not waste such a gift. It would be easy to waste it, going in the direction that he thought I was going.”

Living in an Ecumenical Family

22 Tuesday Sep 2015

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Bridge in Autumn

Many years ago, when I learned that my first cousin had become a Muslim, I was surprised. Central Illinois is not the environment in which I expected Muslim conversion to occur. My cousin, however, met her husband at the University of Illinois, where many students and teachers represent the wider world. He was from Iraq, and they fell in love. She found enough affirmation of her Christian beliefs within Islam to convert, which was easier for her than for him, considering his strong Muslim family ties. Their marriage occurred in the years in which Saddam Hussein and the United States’ administration were on friendly terms, and she went with him to live in Iraq for several years, while his work in agriculture—teaching and government administration—proved rewarding. Then life began to change for everyone concerned, and they found their way back to Illinois and the university. Meanwhile their family grew, and soon I had many Muslim cousins. We were an ecumenical family, with Jews, Christians—both Catholic and Protestant, Muslims, and Buddhists, all related to one another by close family ties.

By the time I had learned of her conversion, I had read a few books on Islam and its practices and history, as well as other faiths. That was an interest of mine, which I pursued in college as well, majoring in philosophy and religion at Illinois Wesleyan University. My instructors were not advocates of Islam; most of them were professing Christians, but they were for the most part fair in their presentations of other faiths, and they encouraged our open-minded communication and visits to the worship and study centers of other faiths, which I did enthusiastically.

Although I was secure in my own faith traditions, aspects of Judaism and of Islam were still attractive enough for me to develop both sympathy and admiration for the faithful people I met from those backgrounds. Clearly a spectrum of beliefs, from hardline and literalistic to permeable and metaphoric, existed in the three branches of the children of Abraham. We were cousins, both in fact and in faith, not always friendly and loving cousins, but potentially so.

A biography of Moses ben Maimon—Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher—fascinated me. Like many of our ancestors of all three faiths he had to flee Spain at one of the historic points of intolerance and expulsion. His refugee journey ended in Egypt under Islamic rule, and he soon found his way into the medical service for the ruling family. His dilemma was whether he could declare himself a Muslim. It would ease his entrance into Egyptian society. Was there a sense in which he could accept the faith of Islam?

As far as the meaning of the word ‘Islam’ was concerned, there was no problem. Being subservient or obedient to the One God was what their faith was about, and so was his faith. That they called him Allah presented no problem, for he understood that ‘Allah” was an Arabic word for God, much as the English people had adopted the old English word ‘God.’ Hebrew had adopted many Semitic words from their cultural environment as names for ‘YHWH’ as well. The practices of Islam—profession of faith, daily prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Medina and Mecca—presented no insurmountable obstacles; those practices were familiar and admirable.

The main question for Maimonides was whether he could affirm that Mohammed was a prophet of God. He didn’t have to declare that Mohammed was the only prophet, since their writings affirmed the prophetic gifts in Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and even Jesus and his mother Mary. Certainly in practice Islamic attention was fixed on Mohammed, but they accepted the prophetic roles of the others as well. Finally, after much thought, Maimonides decided that Mohammed had at least as much prophetic spirit as some of the earlier prophets of Israel. Mohammed had repudiated and replaced the idolatry and polytheism of Arabia with a clear monotheism, he had accepted the validity of the faith of other People of the Book (Jews and Christians), and he had stressed the many attributes of God that Maimonides praised as well—mercy, justice, wisdom, compassion, and patience, among others. Therefore he could affirm the name of Muslim as long as he could continue to practice his Jewish faith as well. That seemed to me a fair and understandable position for a wise man to take.

If I were to live in a world where we were required to affirm a single faith in order to be accepted, I wondered and still wonder what I would do. If the required faith was a form of literalistic and fundamentalist Christianity, I would be as hard-pressed to affirm it as I would be to affirm the same kind of Islam, or Mormonism, or Lutheranism for that matter. As long as our attention is fixed on God and human need, whether I try to live under the title of Jew, Christian, or Muslim, I still have a long way to go to learn how to do it well.

Lama, O lama, O lama….sabachthani?

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Caring, Faith, Suffering

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“My, O my, O my….” Mother cries, not wanting to mimic sacred words if she remembered them. She was always modest and self-effacing, though you might not know that in her dementia, when all self-restraint and impulse control have disappeared with short-term memory. Family remember that her grandmother or grandfather Doane, depending on who is telling the story, used to rock in his rocking chair and moan those same words.

The endurance of the sufferer is rarely exceeded by the endurance of the commiserator. Who can stand by and watch for long when a person is in pain? If there is even the slightest indication that the person in pain craves the attention of the watcher, there is even less tolerance. While this is true of good people, is it true of a good God? If the book of Job provides an indication, who has more patience with a self-pitying sufferer than God? Certainly not Job’s “friends” who in various ways try to persuade Job that his suffering is his own fault.

Mother’s fall and broken neck, while she made her daily trip to the restaurant for a noon meal (and saved half of the food for her evening meal), would by Job’s friends’ accounting be her own fault. Surely no compassionate person would agree, even if they knew the likelihood that a damaging fall would occur sometime. The voice out of the whirlwind might not sound compassionate, but it did not tolerate the victim blamers either. It just voiced the impossibility of understanding the whole picture of life and death, disease and accident and suffering in this world. We do not know the ‘why’ of damaging events, nor of the diseases that rob a highly intelligent, generous, and faithful person of her mind. We must continue to seek healing solutions.

Forgetfulness is not one of the attributes that most people ascribe to the divine. For good reason we hope that there is a storehouse of the memories that human beings often lose, whether that loss is purposeful or not. How many injustices and innocent people disappear under the rugs of history? At the same time we hope that our own errors and failures do disappear in the mercy of divine forgetfulness. Patience and forgetfulness are qualities that God must possess in infinite amounts, even if they are exercised judiciously. They are qualities that belong to a long-suffering God, who listens to the cries and does not turn away out of exhaustion or intolerance.

We pray to that God, just as Aunt Mary Kleinlein urged us to pray, as she remembered many other times that she and her former sister-in-law Mary Alice have done. Even though she also passed the age of 90, she provided a meal for the fellow-sufferers who had not sat down together for a meal in all of the days since Mother fell, while she and her son sat bedside with Mother.

We pray to that God who could remember the cry of the sufferer and speak those words from the mouth of the suffering Christ. Have you forsaken? Will you? Will you leave? No way. Never.

Wait for me, Mary Alice.

10 Thursday Sep 2015

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Of the stories Mary Alice (our Mother) loves to tell, some of her most familiar tell of moving to the farm northeast of New Salem, Illinois. Glen Hillmann moved his family from Quincy, Illinois, to New Salem in 1935, leaving his job as a life insurance salesman, when life insurance was a lower priority than putting food on the table for most people, to become a farmer, with help from his father-in-law, Ezra Doane. Ezra was preparing to move into town, leaving his farms and houses to his daughters’ husbands.

The Hillmanns, Glenn and Dollie Leigh and their four daughters, moved in January, to be ready to do the field work when spring came. Mary Alice had just completed sixth grade in a program that made it possible for students to work at their own accelerated pace. That meant that seventh grade in nearby Tennariff School had already been in session for four months. She came into that grade mid-year in a one-room school, and she faced major changes from the separately graded city schools in Quincy. She wondered whether she could make it in such a strange setting, starting months behind her classmates, with all the grades in one room, and a one-eyed man named Hugh Kerr as her teacher, the first male teacher that she had. She didn’t have to worry. She excelled in her work and fit right in. When Hugh Kerr sent her out with a pail to fetch water, after she had also used the girls’ fancy outhouse, and she returned to the classroom without the pail, then was embarrassed to remember and she slipped out to return with the full pail a few minutes later, and the teacher didn’t say a word to her about it, no punishment or anything, she decided it was going to turn out all right.

Tennariff School sat just around the corner of the section from their farmhouse, an easy quarter mile walk for her and little sister Rosalyn except on the coldest of days. Barbara was still at home, too young for school. In another year Mary Alice joined her older sister Aileen in New Salem High School. That was a long two mile walk up and down the steep Rutman and Quinney Hills. Aileen was taller and her stride longer, but Mary Alice was faster, and she liked to run up the hills, much to the consternation of her less athletic sister. Aileen would whine from behind, “Wait for me, Mary Alice! Wait for me!”

Mary Alice had little patience for her older sister, who didn’t like the farm and didn’t adjust to farm life. Having no boys to help, Mary Alice was happy to become her father’s helping hand around the farm. She did chores with the animals and hitched the horse to the plow, and learned to work in the field. It wasn’t long before a tractor replaced the horses, but she didn’t mind working with either one. Aileen, on the other hand, had no interest and missed the city life.

The old memories and the feelings that came with them persist long into the dementia of aging. Aileen died nearly twenty years ago, and Rosalyn was too young to do field work until after Mary Alice had moved on to study and work at Western Illinois College and obtain her teaching certificate there, which she used for years to teach in a one room country school. Now, when she can neither farm nor teach nor run, she often tells us of the times when she could. She pictures that sister yelling “Wait for me,” every time she has to get up out of bed, use that walker, and head down the hall.

I’m trying to do my best.

08 Tuesday Sep 2015

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“Use your hands!” . . . “Use your hands!” . . . “Use your hands!” . . . the therapist said. (He wanted her to stretch out behind her and grab the arms of the chair before sitting down, but he did not say that.)

I am using my hands. I’m holding onto my walker to steady myself. What do you mean? What are you telling me to do? See my hands. Let me show them to you. You can see I’m used to using my hands. See how the fingers are misshapen. The ends of my fingers go every which way. I played the piano and organ for years and years. I took care of children, hundreds of children in the country school, and then first grade at South Grade, then North Grade School. Do you think I’m stupid? I’m using my hands, a lot longer than you’ve used yours.

If I could stretch out my hands and grab your neck, I’d do it! Don’t think I wouldn’t.

Last night I went to see Mama and Daddy. They said things had changed, just as a matter of fact. They didn’t say how they felt about it. Things have changed. I can’t figure out why. What has happened to me? I don’t like it. I saw the baby you would have had if he had lived. He had to grow up there when he couldn’t live here. He said he liked it there. (I think—Jan did have a miscarriage at three months, but Mother can’t be talking about that.)

My souls have tried to fly away. One is staying there with Mama. She died when I was 33, just when I needed her most, trying to raise four children; my husband not staying by my side. Daddy knew what I needed. His mama died when he was four, but then he had his grandma. I never got to know my grandma. Then she died when he was seven, but he had his older sister, then she died of typhoid. Daddy had to stay with neighbors, Bill and Bess Wireman, who were good people. His daddy had to work the mail route around New Salem, and he couldn’t watch the two little ones all day. Then he married Mary Jane Seaborn, and they all got to live together. My happy soul is there with him, my stubborn soul stays in my body, and my cranky soul goes wandering around this place, wherever this is.

You’re supposed know about these things. Who are you? Why don’t you do something? (I’m your son-in-law. You know me. I’m Gary. You’ve known me for 48 years, over half your life.)

I’m not where I’m supposed to be. You can do something. Take care of it. Or are you still a turtle? Slow to move. (I am a turtle. You are a wolf, and we’re both a little crazy.)

Our souls are flying all over the place.

The Litany

07 Monday Sep 2015

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“Oh, it hurts.”

“What am I going to do?”

“You’re killing me.”

“How do I get out of this?”

“I can’t stand it.”

“I can’t take much more.”

“I’ve got to get something done.”

This litany occurs when the pain control runs out, every two to three hours, especially after a walk, a therapy session, a shower, and any other time when the neck brace has to be removed and repositioned. These are hard words for any child to hear coming from Mother, and these are hard words for any mother to say, when she is a proud and independent 92 year old woman who now must wait for the hands of another to help her through unfathomable pain.

That she survived a broken neck in the first place is a marvel. “She won’t survive surgery to correct it,” the doctor advised. Therefore the counsel is to be patient. In three months the healing should be noticeable if it is going to occur at all. Meanwhile, the challenge is to keep a neck brace in position when it is held in place by easily removable Velcro straps, and her exhausted fragmented mind does not understand why it is there in the first place. The brace becomes the target of her anxious, continuously moving fingers, for which no ball or squeeze toy or curious object can substitute. Surgical tape wrapped around the Velcro frustrates her fingers, but they seem to have a canny mind of their own.

dock at sunset

You should see her when she is walking, bent over her walker, determined to go to the destination. Such a picture of resolve is hardly matched by an Olympic athlete. She concentrated on word-search puzzles when she felt up to it, once yesterday and once the day before. For thirty minutes yesterday she sat in the garden, enjoying the flowers and the 90 degree heat that others found unbearable. Then through the night she slept in five minute snatches and could not find a comfortable position.

We take our turns waiting with her, listening, and wondering. What will happen if no one is here by her side?

Watching in the Night

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

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My mother died suddenly at age 75 after a brief period of intense illness early one morning. No one else was there except my father. When he was nearly 94 my father died when my brother and I were far away, hiking on the Appalachian Trail, and we were unaware of his several hours of declining life signs. He was living in a nursing home, and the staff called my son, who was able to be present with him. He died, as his death certificate so elegantly phrased it, of “a failure to thrive.” I never spent a night with either of them, when they were seriously ill, although I have spent many nights with other seriously ill people, many of whom were dear to me.

I was not especially close to my father-in-law, although I had plenty of cause to respect him, but Jan and I were with him the hour that he died, after his year dealing with colon cancer in treatments of diminishing effectiveness. He appeared to be comatose when we arrived, but in the last moments of his illness he became alert and agitated. I said to him, “It’s all right, Lyle. You can let go now. We’ll soon be coming after you,” and whether it was the meaning or the tone or something inside himself, he relaxed and soon stopped breathing

Now Jan and I sit with my 92 year old mother-in-law through the second of two nights, staying at her bedside. We no longer fear that she may die at any moment, even though that can happen of course. She fell three days ago, where she had walked hundreds of times before, tripping into her walker and landing hard on her face. She broke a neck vertebra and two more farther down her back. The doctors’ advice ruled out surgery, and they put her in a neck brace that she will probably wear the rest of her days. The vertebra remains in alignment, but a bump or slip or twist could change that without the brace.

She is “banged up” with cuts, bruises, and swelling around her face and broken nose, but she is mostly comfortable until she tries to move, which, naturally, she has to do now and then. We supposed that sooner or later she would fall, possibly breaking the increasingly fragile bones in her legs or hips. She always finds ways to surprise us. What broke was her neck. Somehow she survived it, breaking it just enough to keep living. She doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t like the collar and wants to remove it. How she will keep going, doing what she has to do, and learn how to live with that brace, we do not know.

She has been my mother for 47 years, doing what mothers do, and doing it well. It must be my turn to watch, feel the pain with her when she hurts, and understand more deeply what it means to suffer with someone I love.

Too Many Teasets, Never Enough Tea

28 Friday Aug 2015

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The first tea set came from Italy, a poignant reminder from Jan’s brother Rod that he could not come to our wedding because he was serving the U S Navy on a destroyer tender in the Mediterranean that year. He thought of his sister when he shopped on shore leave, and found a white china tea set elaborately decorated with silver vines and flowers. His taste was exquisite, and the set was too pretty to use every day, so it has been prominently displayed wherever we lived, and used for special occasions.

The second tea set came from our seminary neighbors and friends; he had grown up in Thailand and India while his father had served as a missionary. The china teapot was a rich, mottled blue, and the cups small and with no handles, with the white and black figures of pussy willow branches climbing their sides—broadly Asian in inspiration—they easily served us every day and got a lot of use while we thought of ourselves as distant from the world around us but alive in our private garden.

The third tea set was plastic pink and white and a child’s plaything as our daughter went through the terrible two’s, but somehow she settled down to play with her future set before her, among her friends or by herself. The set itself hung around our house for more than two decades until it was replaced by a small, miniature, plain china set that our three granddaughters could use when they held elaborate tea parties, as they dressed to the nines while their grandparents served them as their butler and maid.

We inherited the fourth tea set when my parents died, first my mother, then my father. It came to my house with Father, when he had to leave his own farm home and come to live with us. My mother had chosen the silver tea service as they celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and it served many neighborhood and church group teas from then until they passed their fifty-sixth anniversary and she died unexpectedly.

Now those tea sets sit in their various places, while we enjoy our morning tea, without caffeine, steeped in cups that come from none of the tea sets, but they each have their own history, too. Each marks a special time in our lives that is fondly remembered. When we finally put them away, delivering them to someone else to use, the memories will remain with us, tucked away somewhere inside our brains. Tea and those we love.

The Different Dogs of Chicago Politics

22 Saturday Aug 2015

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Chicago skyline 1970Dick Simpson, a political science professor at University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago, called Chicago “the most corrupt city in the country, and Illinois the third most corrupt state” in a February 2012 report for the Chicago Journal. “The truth is that the governor’s mansion and the city council chambers have a far worse crime rate than the worst ghetto in Chicago.” http://chicagoist.com/2012/02/17/dick_simpson_study_says_chicago_is.php

I met Professor Simpson in January of 1969, when he was instrumental in organizing the Independent Precinct Organization, and I was a student at Chicago Theological Seminary. The seminary encouraged students to get involved in churches , community and political organizations, and to engage in cycles of action and reflection (theological and ethical) with other students. I had worked, successively but not successfully, with the Eugene McCarthy and the Hubert Humphrey campaigns in 1968. The Chicago democratic machine held no attraction for me, but independent community-based politics was a different matter. Many local churches were involved in our own 5th Ward and in the 43rd Ward on Chicago’s North side, and it was easy to volunteer.

The first campaign for the IPO backed Bill Singer for Chicago Alderman for the 43rd Ward against the democratic machine. Singer had been a protege of Senator Paul Douglas and a friend of 5th Ward Alderman Leon Despres. I admired both of them, so I signed up to help with the Singer campaign, door to door canvassing and poll watching. Against odds, Singer was successful. The most inspiration, however, came from Dick Simpson, and his encouragement of young people and community residents to take part in the political process, in spite of the cynicism and despair that had gripped most reform efforts during those years. When other organizations gave up (the University Christian Movement among them), and others went underground (Students for a Democratic Society), the IPO offered hope to those of us who were inclined to believe that change would eventually come if we just kept working, even if it was only on a small local scale. Where else would it begin?

Change came, and it didn’t. Dick Simpson ran for alderman and joined the City Council for several years. Other independent candidates for mayor succeeded after Mayor Richard J. Daley’s death, and positive results followed, but corruption has continued to dog Chicago and Illinois politics. I and many others can take inspiration from the dogged determination of people like Dick Simpson, who are still involved and working.