Homecoming
Two years, two months, and five days ago my precious wife boarded a plane by herself and flew 800 miles away from where were living to care for her mother who had only weeks prior suffered a “cardiac event” and had surgery to insert stents. The doctors, one in particular, stated it was a “miracle” that she was in as good a shape as she was after suffering such an “event” and making it through the surgery. In spite of that opinion, she wasn’t expected to live more than some estimated months after the fact. Here she was on Thanksgiving that same year, six months later:
My wife remained living as a live-in caretaker for her mother for these past 2 years, absent from our home those 800 miles away. During this time others with whom we shared this experience have asked how she and I are able to live apart for so long. Granted, we had just made a major change in our life with immediate plans for the future, all of which were put on full stop when my wife made the commitment to her mother to be there “until the end”.
That “end” came only a couple of weeks ago. Mom had a stroke, seemed once again to have the will to recover, but, knowing the burden placed on her daughter as her aged strength had quite naturally been in decline, requiring quite literally around the clock attention for everything from meals, changing clothes, bathing and, nearer the end, personal business in the bathroom, my wife and I realized later that Mom had given in for her daughter’s sake – a gift in return for the selfless, sacrificial, loving care that my wife provided her mother in the waning years of her life. She did this virtually alone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week – without her own transportation and fully dependent on others for the purchase of all her and her mother’s needs. My wife never left the house with the exception of taking Mom on walks in the neighborhood or during the few times I was able to visit.
We, as human beings, simply no longer understand the value of life, especially human life. Every single human life is precious, a gift. Not only a gift for one’s self being alive, but each life a gift to everyone around us. We have squandered such gifts. We walk through each day and focus on “me me me”, ignoring that we are here for each other – not to be served, but to serve. To give yourself away, to sacrifice, to lay on the line of personal comfort anything, and sometimes, like in my wife’s case, everything, to show love to another. How wonderful, absolutely wonderful, life would truly be if we simply learned to love one another – instead of selfishly loving ourselves too much.
Well, Mom has traveled across the threshold and now begins working on her next life, taking with her not only the experience of her 85 years, but also the incredible love her daughter laid at her feet for her last two years. And now my wife is faced with just how she will pick up the book of her future. She is a (very) different person – to that I, her husband, best friend and confidant can attest – than she was when she mustered the courage to get on a plane alone and fly into the unknown. This is what love does to a person – it changes you in ways you can never imagine. Love is not a gamble where you play odds for personal gain. Love is a risk. It is a risk because it requires that you give of yourself down to the very foundation of self. How we have lost the courage to take such a risk!
As for me, well, I cannot avoid but be cliché here, but I am the most blessed of men. My wife and I have been married for 32 years. It took the first 10 to work out who we were – personally – within the marriage, within the relationship. It took the second 10 years to diminish the selfishness that seeks for personal pleasure and comfort and gain. So it took 20 years to break free of the bonds that selfishness binds us to ourselves and learn what an enormous well of pleasure, comfort and gain real love truly is. It was those third 10 years spent building up that foundational love that gave us both the strength of will to make a commitment – and hold to it – to another human being, not weighing the potential cost beforehand – for real love cannot, should not, ever do so. And, once the potential of that cost started to ray forth from the reality of that commitment, it took unbending courage to hold out until the commitment was realized in full.
But I say all of that in the context of “we” – for she would only have it be so, that is, that both of us sacrificed, both of us suffered under the weight of being apart for so long. However, mine was never the sacrifice. For Mom gave me the most precious gift any man could ever dream of. Mine was simply a gesture of thanks for that gift. It was my wife, her daughter, that sacrificed every ounce of herself to do what few people, even family members, seem to be capable of doing any more these days.
I could go on, sharing the extreme minutia of care my wife provided her mother over the course of those two years. But, my wife and I both being writers of a sort, I have committed to pushing her to write a book of this experience. I have a challenge ahead regarding this, as she is sure to want to put it behind her going forward. But during this time she has blogged her experience, sharing her inner and outer struggles. And I know of at least one person who not only related to what she was going through, but benefitted from gaining a sense of not being alone in a similar struggle and commitment.
I’ll end this post there. But without further adieu, here is my beautiful wife. She returns home soon. Our life will fashion itself into something new, something exciting. Love NEVER fails. It grows. It heals. It lives.
“Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another the most varied opinions can be reconciled – thus one of the most important tasks for humankind today and in the future is that we should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of development is empty.”
~Rudolf Steiner