Just Getting By

I don’t believe the Bible anymore. Not a word of it, really. I think it’s a useful manuscript for understanding people and how they understand the world. I think the version of the Bible used by evangelical Christians tells a particular story crafted, curated, and systematized to advance a particular brand of social order.

But none of that really helps when your Christian parents are getting old or dying. On his last night on earth, my dad was horribly present. He wasn’t able to communicate much, but, unlike the preceding weeks characterized by lazily drifting along the spectrum from weak and sleepy to bright and gregarious, this night (and much of the whole day) the physical malfunctions boiled to the surface.

Dad fought through every minute as frantic, bite-sized seizures riddled his entire body. He mumbled an incoherent diatribe of random thoughts, irrelevant questions, and panicked reports on his physical state. There weren’t monitors beeping or alarms sounding or any of the stereotypical melodrama associated with dying. It was just nonstop discomfort with very little of his trademark human tenderness. And I knew what he would do if he were in my seat.

He would read Scripture. And even though I felt pretty conflicted and disingenuous doing so, that’s what I did. The phrase you find yourself using all the time right before and just after the end of a man’s life—That’s what he would have wanted—applied here. And you know what? I don’t even know if it helped at all. Maybe it did. He listened at first. He still seemed to panic through most of it. He didn’t survive much longer. But I do know that he knew we were there.

I think music may have helped. I wish I had tried that. That’s another difference between that moment and what you see on TV and movies . . . there was no music.

Anyway, it certainly didn’t feel like the factually authentic thing to do for me to read the Word of God (with the air quotes coming through in my voice, I assume) to help my Dad through that moment, but it definitely felt like the thing most likely to do some good. So how could I not do it even if it made my hate myself a little bit?

Fast forward to now. My mom is still very much alive and thriving and believing in Jesus with her whole heart, but her short-term memory is in shambles. Some days are better than others. Every morning is a journey of discovery, and at various points in the opening hour of the day she’ll either recall on her own or be reminded by one of her kids the following key pieces of data:

• Today’s date

• Today’s schedule

• How the Cubs are doing

• The bare and simple fact that her husband of over half a century is gone

All of our brains have a particular region that stores recent memories, but we have another part of our brains dedicated to keeping unwelcome developments out. When something particularly unacceptable or unprecedented happens, it’s the little security guard that says, “No way!” on our behalf. In my mom’s brain, that guy still works really hard while the recent-memory storage cage has its front door wide open and perfectly acceptable memories just wander in and out as they please.

As a result, Mom has to relive Dad’s death every morning. It’s particularly unfair and unkind of life to do that to her, but some days it hits hard and some days the bitter truth makes a soft landing. And now, I think the nights are becoming the harder part.

Last night she thought she had a dream that Dad had died. A few nights before, she woke up in the middle of the night with her radio on and thought it was her alarm going off. But we checked her room, and there isn’t a radio-equipped alarm clock to be found.

As it turns out, my mother might not remember at any given moment that my father has died, but when she goes to bed at night (typically at some point after midnight) she definitely knows he’s missing. She doesn’t have to be reminded of that. There isn’t a whole lot she can do about it, but she’s still managed to take matters into her own hands.

As a steadfast Cub fan, my mom has a longstanding tradition of keeping a radio in the living room so she can listen to Pat Hughes call the games while she watches on TV with the volume down. But that radio isn’t in the living room any more.

Now, Mom keeps the radio by her bed. If you ask her, she’ll usually say she listens to Moody Radio to hear if they’ll say anything about Dad or play some kind of tribute. But every now and then when she answers, she accidentally lets slip what I think is the real reason she often falls asleep with the radio on:

I was trying to find Dad’s program.

Dad’s program, Music Thru the Night, aired midnights to 5 am every night. And while my mom would sleep next to my dad, my dad’s prerecorded voice would go out to throngs of worried, frantic, suffering people who just wanted a soothing voice to calm them down.

A few weeks ago, my dad was one of those people. And now, it’s my mom’s turn.

This leaves my mom in a pretty rough state from time to time. It leaves me in another difficult position. Because I can tell her all the facts and theories about why she’s going through what she’s going through . . . but they don’t help. No. And I know what she will respond to. If I tell her she’ll see my dad again and that the God that holds her in His hand has my dad cradled in those same fingers? That will help. It really doesn’t matter if I believe it or not.

I got into this whole routine of writing to help some other version of 35-year-old me struggling to make sense of the cognitive dissonance of faith. But right now, my 81-year-old mom is the one who needs help. If I’m really dedicated to helping people, I guess what I know has to take a backseat to what I used to believe.