Faith Works 8-22-2025
Jeff Gill
A journey with few familiar landmarks
___
My sister and I spent some good time with our mother this past week. I was in and out a couple of times during the day, tending to some of the practical matters of having a family member in a memory care facility.
We are past the point where I worry about her seeing me walk past and recognizing me. Unless I walk directly up to her and announce who I am, she's not going to see me.
Mom is one of the more verbal, and social individuals among the forty or so residents of the place where she now lives. Verbal as in she talks, but even when you own a copy of the guidebook, what she says doesn't track well. There are broken signposts of familiar stories which still stick up from her monologues, but we're past the point where you can gently nudge or fill in a story to get her back onto solid ground.
When we come in and address her, she will still recognize us with a clear prompt as to who we are, up to a point. She will launch into a story whose fragments are related to one of us, and if we point that out, she laughs and says "no, no, not you, one of the original boys." Free gift: if you need a band name, "The Original Boys" is available.
She used to like it when one of us would get out a phone to take a picture; now, she just can't make sense of what we're doing, so it's catch as catch can if we get her looking. And the incomprehension continues to spread in weird & sometimes awful ways… but she is consistently, almost always, unreservedly happy. Griefs & grudges that used to consume her are gone. This is a blessing.
I'm not making the best of a bad situation here, I'm quite serious. To see my mother as happy as she's been over the last few months has been a surprise I did not expect, as much as I've been familiar as a minister over the years with convalescent homes and memory units and Alzheimer's as it erodes away memory and personality.
Memory loss means she generally doesn't know who I am, but she's if anything even happier to see me. There are things she used to talk about to our frustration, burdens and sorrows which I would have loved to have taken from her, but she had a long-standing tendency to pick back up whenever she could one of those jagged rocks, and would pitch it into whatever conversation we were having.
They're gone. She's not bothered by them anymore. They've been left behind. There's still a shadow of those past events that shows up at times, because they're such a part of her life that as long as there's still anything left of her, we'll hear a mention of them, but they don't dominate the conversation.
She's happy to tell you her stories, and her pleasure in doing so is more obvious for the shadows that are gone. The fact that her stories don't make much sense anymore? That's a trade I'm surprised to be happy to make. What have we wanted for her, after all, except that she could be happy: and now she is. It doesn't quite look like what we might have imagined, but that's where she's still a unique individual, even if without some of the memories we assumed had to be there for her to be her.
There are blessings on this journey, you just have to make sure to look closely for them. They can be hard to miss, but they're there. And those blessings make me wonder what I need to be forgetting, of my own free will. It might be a good thing to remember, this forgetting.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's aware that forgetting might be a better way to remember some things. Tell him what you've forgotten at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Jeff Gill
A journey with few familiar landmarks
___
My sister and I spent some good time with our mother this past week. I was in and out a couple of times during the day, tending to some of the practical matters of having a family member in a memory care facility.
We are past the point where I worry about her seeing me walk past and recognizing me. Unless I walk directly up to her and announce who I am, she's not going to see me.
Mom is one of the more verbal, and social individuals among the forty or so residents of the place where she now lives. Verbal as in she talks, but even when you own a copy of the guidebook, what she says doesn't track well. There are broken signposts of familiar stories which still stick up from her monologues, but we're past the point where you can gently nudge or fill in a story to get her back onto solid ground.
When we come in and address her, she will still recognize us with a clear prompt as to who we are, up to a point. She will launch into a story whose fragments are related to one of us, and if we point that out, she laughs and says "no, no, not you, one of the original boys." Free gift: if you need a band name, "The Original Boys" is available.
She used to like it when one of us would get out a phone to take a picture; now, she just can't make sense of what we're doing, so it's catch as catch can if we get her looking. And the incomprehension continues to spread in weird & sometimes awful ways… but she is consistently, almost always, unreservedly happy. Griefs & grudges that used to consume her are gone. This is a blessing.
I'm not making the best of a bad situation here, I'm quite serious. To see my mother as happy as she's been over the last few months has been a surprise I did not expect, as much as I've been familiar as a minister over the years with convalescent homes and memory units and Alzheimer's as it erodes away memory and personality.
Memory loss means she generally doesn't know who I am, but she's if anything even happier to see me. There are things she used to talk about to our frustration, burdens and sorrows which I would have loved to have taken from her, but she had a long-standing tendency to pick back up whenever she could one of those jagged rocks, and would pitch it into whatever conversation we were having.
They're gone. She's not bothered by them anymore. They've been left behind. There's still a shadow of those past events that shows up at times, because they're such a part of her life that as long as there's still anything left of her, we'll hear a mention of them, but they don't dominate the conversation.
She's happy to tell you her stories, and her pleasure in doing so is more obvious for the shadows that are gone. The fact that her stories don't make much sense anymore? That's a trade I'm surprised to be happy to make. What have we wanted for her, after all, except that she could be happy: and now she is. It doesn't quite look like what we might have imagined, but that's where she's still a unique individual, even if without some of the memories we assumed had to be there for her to be her.
There are blessings on this journey, you just have to make sure to look closely for them. They can be hard to miss, but they're there. And those blessings make me wonder what I need to be forgetting, of my own free will. It might be a good thing to remember, this forgetting.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's aware that forgetting might be a better way to remember some things. Tell him what you've forgotten at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
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