Our Stories

As you know, I have been traveling the road of dementia with my mom and it involves many interesting stories.   Yesterday she asked me to come over and I explained that I was a thousand miles away.   She said, “OK, now I understand.”    I said, “so what can I do to help you from here” to which she responded, “I want you to come over right now and look in my closet.”

Sigh.

She was telling me how upset she gets when she gets confused.  She reported that the night before she had been thinking about her purse just sitting out there with all these people around and what it someone stole her identity?  Then she said that she started to ask if she was still herself.  “Am I still me?  Who am I?  Where am I?”  I asked her if she had figured out the answers to those questions since and she said yes.   I explained that as she was getting older she was going to have times that felt scary and that she just needed to remember that they would pass and that God would take care of her.

She said, “Of course He will.  He had these days planned out for me before I was born!”   I was in awe that even in the midst of such confusion she could come up with profound biblical truth.  In Psalm 139 we read:

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.

At the age of 89 my mom is remembering that all of the days of her life — not just the ones where she was young and healthy and productive — but ALL of them even when she is old, and can’t get around, and has dementia— were written in God’s book.

One of my mom’s favorite things to do is sing through the hymnal.   She can sing song after song for an hour — those old hymns and choruses that have sustained her for decades.

I am sure that she sang this old favorite written by Fanny J. Crosby.   You may know that Fanny wrote over 8000 songs even though she was struck blind shortly after birth.

If my mom at 89 can sing this song, and Fanny Crosby could write it, you and I should be able to sing it loudly today…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exOLVgRZT4E