Both my parents are in a nursing home. Dad is in a nursing home because he’s old: he’s eighty-eight and struggles to move. Mum is in a nursing home because she’s old (she’s eighty-five) and also because she has advanced Parkinson’s and dementia. She is effectively bedbound, except when the nurses move her into the communal living room to watch TV in an enormous, reclining chair. They live in Tasmania; I live in Adelaide. I try to get down there as often as I can to see them (which is not as often as I’d like).
When I last went to see them, Mum was in her enormous recliner. She instantly broke into a smile—good, she could still recognise me!—and I went and gave her a hug. I sat next to her and asked her how she was doing. She said something in reply, but it didn’t make much sense. That’s how Mum is these days: she can talk, but it doesn’t make much sense. You’ve just got to go with the flow, following her lead down little pathways of conversation, which make sense to her but not to anyone else. It’s fine: she’s happy, and it’s lovely to talk to her, wherever we end up going.
Photos on My Phone
The conversation dried up pretty quickly, so I took out my phone to show her some photographs of my family, as I often do. She doesn’t remember my wife or my kids anymore, so every time I show her a photograph I have to identify them: ‘This is my wife, Suzie. And these are your grandchildren,’ and I go through their names. She nods with interest. At one point, I came to a video I’d taken in the park. Three of the kids kicking a football. The youngest kicks first, and his little five-year-old legs make a bit of a hash of it, skewing the ball. Mum laughed with delight. ‘Little boy,’ she said.
At the same time as we were doing this, a David Attenborough documentary was on in the background. Something about bears. As it happened, at just the moment my youngest started kicking the ball, some moving music played in the documentary. The soundtrack to the documentary became the soundtrack to my mum watching the video on my phone. The end of life watching the beginning of life; an old lady in a chair watching vigorous children kick a ball in the sun. I didn’t cry, but I edged that way.
Outwardly We Are Wasting Away
Mum is a Christian. Has been for years. Her body is deflating, getting a bit smaller every time I see her. She is like a tent slowly falling to the ground. It reminds me of 2 Corinthians chapters 4 and 5: ‘outwardly we are wasting away’ (4:16); ‘the earthly tent we live in is destroyed’ (5:1); ‘while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened’ (5:4). Written on the page, the process seems almost noble, romantic; but it’s not when you see it happening in front of you. Death isn’t mucking around. It’s taking Mum’s teeth, and stripping precious weight from her body, palsying her hands until it comes for her for good. When you see the process in 3D, in the form of your mum, it’s anything but noble or romantic. It’s sad and grey and banal: nature documentaries in the nursing home living room.
Inwardly We Are Being Renewed Day by Day
But Scripture also tells me there’s something else going on inside Mum. I can’t see it, but it’s there. ‘Outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day’ (4:16). Somewhere in there, God tells me, there’s an invincible core; an iron spine of light that can’t be put out—that is growing in brightness.
‘For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all’ (4:17). Mum has an eternal future ahead of her. It is weighty with glory. It will never end. And that makes her current suffering—that is not insignificant, mind you—‘light and momentary’. In the big scheme of eternity, God promises, Mum’s suffering is unmentionably brief. And in this sense, she is being renewed ‘day by day’—every day now is another day closer to that glorious then.
I can’t see it, of course. That’s the point. Mum’s resurrection is in the future. The thing that is renewing her day by day hasn’t happened outwardly yet. But it will. And I can know it will, because it happened to Jesus, and Mum is in Jesus. And so: ‘We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal’ (4:18).
I get up to leave. The nature documentary is still going: the bear is being seen off by some walruses. I tell Mum I love her and give her another hug. She squeezes back faintly. I say goodbye and walk out of the room, and her attention has already drifted by the time I’m at the door. That’s what I mean. It’s all very banal.
And yet, there she still is.
Collapsing like a tent.
Invincible.
