Beauty for Ashes

 

In more than two decades of marriage, we have cared for 6 of our elders together, accompanying 5 of them on the last leg of their earthly journeys, through multiple illnesses, hospital stays and ultimately, palliative care at home. This was not something we had planned on doing and I certainly had absolutely no skills to do any of it when we began. I have joked with my husband that if I knew before marrying him, that we would give so much of our lives to our elders, I probably wouldn’t have married him. He knows I was not really joking 😉

I have also not cared for 3 other elders because I was too young/too indifferent/too overwhelmed with caregiving when the time came for them. And so I write this post, not with pride, but with gratitude for this ongoing journey. The gratitude comes with much retrospect because in the thick of things, I had no time to reflect, only enough time to respond the best I could. And in retrospect, I can see so clearly the beauty from the ashes of our burned-up dreams. 

 

 

Many things took a backseat to be able to make caregiving our priority:

 1. Our marriage was always growing under great responsibility. We had no   honeymoon phase, babymoon phase or ‘that chill year’.

2.   2. Our own hopes for starting a family always took second place to caring for the family we already had. There was no way we could face the prospect of having children by evading responsibility for those who had cared for us when we were children.

3.   3. The ways in which we loved to serve God also took a back seat to caregiving for elders. There was absolutely no sense in doing ‘ministry’ in public at the cost of doing it at home.

4.   4. Our personal health, hobbies, pet projects were always the first things to be cut out from the list of things to do every time the responsibility for elders increased.

5.   5. Both of us were always clear with our bosses that our family came before work. Chasing career goals/promotions/raises was completely out of the question.

 And yet, when I look back, I do not regret any of these as losses. In fact, so many times, I thank God for sparing me the agony of chasing a dream that was not His dream for me.

 

In all these years, I have come across three distinct reactions to people who observe us with our elders:

 Many cannot handle watching us do even simple things for our elders and have stayed away, distanced themselves, or cut off from us completely. As our elders got sicker, these ‘friends’ and ‘family’ got colder. They just couldn’t handle even observing our lifestyle, maybe for fear that they may be persuaded to do the same for their elders. Maybe guilt that they had already lost the chance to do so. Whatever it was, we were none the poorer without them.

2.   The second group is of those who openly laughed at us. They found our priorities ridiculous, mocked us for being so outdated and did their best to make us feel small. It didn’t work because we were already small enough 😉

3.   The third group is of those who may not even know us but walk up to us to smile, say good morning, ask who the latest elder in our life is and say one line that I have heard so many times: “God will bless you for caring for your elders.” It’s like that line was just bursting out of their hearts and they just had to say it.

And it’s this last response that actually baffles me the most.

Firstly, because it says that the world is such a terrible place that human beings caring for the very human beings who cared so well for them is a HUGE deal! It seems to be a rare feat, gauging by their reactions and it really shouldn’t be, you know??!

Jesus said: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.” Luke 6:32

By sinners, he means everyone, of course, because we are all sinners in need of His salvation.

So, Jesus is saying, that even by the world’s standards, it really is no biggie to take care of those who have first cared for you.

Secondly, it baffles me that the blessing this group showers on us is always in the future tense. “God WILL bless you”, they say.

And while I certainly wouldn’t turn down any offer of future blessings, I think I have not been clear to them in how very blessed we are in the midst of the caregiving.

So here it is. The list of blessings we have received in the midst of these decades of caregiving for our vulnerable elders.

1.   Every crisis made us stronger: as individuals and as a team. The only way to be unafraid of fire is to walk through it. We have walked through a lot of fires together and we have come out stronger.

2.   Every crisis, whether short lived or long lasting, ushered us even more urgently into Jesus’ arms. You will never know that Jesus is really all you need, until Jesus is all you have. When everything around us collapses, Jesus is still there. And Jesus is still enough.

 3.   Caring for the elderly taught us a lot about the cycle of life. It doesn’t surprise to experience our own aging process because we have observed the same happen in so many others. We are unafraid of our own old age because it all seems so familiar, in contrast to what popular culture would have us believe: aging is not a plague to be avoided with intense exercise, anti-aging creams and hair dyes. It is to embraced as a very natural and necessarily humbling step before we meet our Maker.

 4.   There is a blessing in having your elders at home. As a multi-generational family, we are able to give and receive love in so many wonderful ways that wouldn’t have been possible if we were a nuclear family.

 5.   Our children learn about service from watching us serve, not from watching us preach about service. They closely watch every gesture, every move, every word we utter and they imitate what we do, not what we tell them to do.

 6.   I loved being someone’s daughter in law, love being someone’s grand-daughter. Even in their feeblest state, the very presence of our elders has had such a powerfully positive impact on us. When they passed away, our home felt empty and hollow even with the noise of children. Even when we relished our long-awaited freedom to come and go as we please without having someone at home to be cared for, when we entered an empty house, it felt truly empty without them.

 7.   We learned to love the unlove-able. Caring for children is much easier than caring for elders because children give you continuous positive reinforcement with their smiles, kisses and growing antics. But caring for people who are too ill to smile back, say thank you or even understand, much less appreciate your service truly teaches you what unconditional love is.

 8.   God’s timely provision from His abundant resources more than made up for any lack of money, esteem, children, hobbies, holidays, or anything else that we didn’t have time to acquire ourselves.

 9.   There is a deep joy and peace that comes from whole heartedly caring for someone who would be in a bad state without this care. Even if no one ever notices or appreciates it, we know in our hearts that the alternative would not be God’s will. And so, just being able to do God’s will is a blessing in itself. Every night, we sleep in peace, knowing that we have left no stone unturned.

 10.       Every time we buried a loved one we had cared for, we experienced immense peace at the funeral: no regrets and no tears. We had done all our crying with our elders as they suffered, laughed with them in their small joys, journeyed with them through every high and low. At the end of their lives, at their funerals, there were really no more tears to cry.

 At the end of our journeys with our 5 elders, we found what Jesus was anointed to give us, who had grieved for what He grieved: beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning and the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. Isaiah 61:3

This is what we experienced at each of those 5 funerals and I wouldn’t trade it for anything the world could offer me.

To God be all the glory!