Looking forwad to joining my Mom:

Something To Think About, Thanks Mom, 5/12

I am greatly indebted to the woman I was privileged to call, "Mom," Irene Hargrove Merrell. Yesterday was the first Mother's Day I spent without my mom.  In a practical sense Mom had been gone for several years.  At first mom exhibited confusion, then frustration with not knowing others and not understanding that what was going on.  After a time she experienced periodic bouts of fear, because she didn't know who she was.  On a couple of occasions she plaintively told my sister, with whom she lived, "I don't know who I am."  Finally the tightening grip of dementia squeezed out even the ability to recognize that she didn't know.  Mom was mostly gone for quite a while before she died.  Having said that, it was still a comfort to know that mom was there.  I knew when I called her, or went to visit her that my words on the phone or even my presence by her side had little impact.  At the end, her life was lived like a person looking out of a moving vehicle through a very narrow, vertical slit.  For a fleeting second she saw something that wouldbring her a moment of joy, or sometimes even pain, but any memory of what had happened--even a second before--was gone and there was no anticipation of what was next.  That slit narrowed and narrowed until little if anything from the outside made it in.  The last time or two I went to see my mom I answered the question, "Why are you going?" with, "I know mom won't know or remember that I was there, but I will know."  Now that is gone for me as well.  I'll see mom again in heaven, not before. I don't write from sadness--at least not primarily so.  I figure my life is not unlike the way I imagine mom's experience toward the end.  Believing that my life is eternal, I figure my present situation is like my mom's dementia-choked experience.  I see such a tiny bit of reality--an infinitesimal portion of the ultimate reality.  Using a slightly different picture, the Apostle Paul said, "We see in a mirror dimly."  There is so much in the past, and in the infinite future that doesn't register on my time-bound mind.    My mom has not only gone back to the person she was before she began her long slow decline.  She has become all that God intended her to be.  I enjoyed Mother's Day.  I enjoyed it because I am Thankful for all that my mom gave to me and my siblings.  I enjoyed it because of the awareness that my Mother has emerged not only from that limited view that marked the end of her life, but from the limitation that marks all life in this time-bound world before those of us who, by God's grace, have been given eternal life will emerge into that realm in which we "will know fully just as [we] also have been fully known."  (1 Corinthians 13:12) I look forward to not only seeing my Mother, but truly seeing myself for the first time. It's STTA.