My mother was widowed at fifty-five.  Going back to business school she ended up teaching there for ten years.  She lived in Houston, Texas and when she retired at sixty-five she was finding the big city traffic and distances a challenge. So, she came to live with us for a year while we built her a cozy two-bedroom house next to ours out in the country.  She lived there three years but was becoming forgetful and a hazard to herself and the house, so she moved back in with us.                                            

We were now dealing with a financial challenge because of a recession that hit right after we moved our architecture office to Dickson. So, both of us were working. I was teaching first and second grade in a small rural Catholic School. So, for those two years, I took her with me and let her work with children needing extra help with reading.  She loved it and they loved her. But then I started working at Fort Campbell at a better paying civil service position and she was becoming too confused to be alone, so we used her Social Security to hire someone to stay with her during the day.  Medical tests at the time did not show why she was having so many mental issues. I took a course in nutrition at Austin Peay hoping I could find something that would help her, but nothing did.

 Then, she started getting dressed in the middle of the night and falling down our steep driveway that went through the woods.  So, we wired our nine doors shut every night, but then she began to cook at two and three in the morning and leave things burning on the stove. Finally, my husband insisted we needed to put her in a nursing home where she would be safe. I did not want to do this, but we went to counseling, and I finally agreed. At that time Medicare made up the difference between her ability to pay and the cost. She lived seven more years, becoming physically disabled along with more mental issues from what now was known to be Alzheimer’s. I was broken-hearted, but at this point my salary was our main support.                                                                            

The Sunday evening after we put her in the home, I was driving back from my job as Director of Catholic Religious Education for the Chaplain’s Division. My church didn’t have a Sunday evening service and I was trying to think of somewhere to go to a Worship Service for spiritual support. As I drove down a country road on the way home, I saw a very old small church with people going in and thought about stopping there. But they were all black people and I thought I might be intruding, so I continued as it began to drizzle. A little way farther along, there was an elderly black gentleman walking toward the church in his Sunday go to Meeting suit, so I stopped and asked if I could give him a lift back to the church. He accepted and as I turned around toward it, he invited me to join them. I decided it was the Holy Spirit at work and accepted his invitation. At the service the choir sang a song about some day understanding all the hard things and it hit me that they had been struggling with all sorts of serious hardships for two hundred years. It gave me a perspective, since I had seen how happy a black woman in her nineties was at the nursing home and learned she had lived alone in a one room shack with no electricity or water and a wood burning stove for both heat and cooking for the last ten years. Now she had a comfortable bed, warm room, three meals a day fixed for her, a shower, people taking care of her, and even television.

 As seven years passed mom died by inches and had become mostly unresponsive when she finally ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. She was fighting for her breath and was terrified.  I was praying that God would help her somehow and as I prayed she stopped gasping and crying and started staring toward the blank wall at the end of her bed with a puzzled, but calm look on her face.  I don’t know what she saw, but it stopped her panic and she eventually drifted into a deep sleep and died a few days later. After two funerals, one in Dickson and another in Houston next to my Dad’s grave, I was waiting in my car to meet a friend. I was crying and more or less mentally yelling “WHY? WHY?” at God. I decided I needed to get a grip before my friend came and went into a small shop there. The first thing I saw as I walked in was a card with just these brightly colored words across it saying, “Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.”             God is in the timing.