Eighteen years ago my mother's apartment was completely ruined by a flood. My sister shouldered the messy job of rehoming her, and dredging through her belongings to salvage what she could. We were on the other coast, loading up a truck with all of our earthly belongings to move east. I was pregnant with twins, and didn't know it.
The task was enormous, and yet it did have a solution. For the next few months Mom lived in a different complex until we could have an addition built on our home. Another huge task for which I did exactly nothing.
There were other calamities in our mother's life. Her mental illness for one. Yet unlike the influx of unwelcome water, there was no solution that we could find. Even if we wanted to, which we did, we could not rebuild her thinking.
Our minds are capricious. As much as we might try to discipline them, force them to behave or retain, they follow their own whimsy. I recall the pivotal questions the doctor asked of my mother days before she died in November 0f 2006.
"Mrs. Soneson, who is the President?"
After a long pause she spoke. "Ford."
"What day is today?" he went on.
"October?" she answered tentatively.
"Marjorie, what is 20 minus 3?"
She looked worried. The question was clearly of great importance, and she struggled with the effort to please him. We waited a painfully long time, but she couldn't form the words. I felt the heaviness of my mother's sense of failure.
When people we love falter with mental illness, or dementia, it is overwhelming. Yet it is the unwelcome reality. We take steps into uncertainty, but even that effort requires courage.
When I was in college I had a course about God. There were three attributes we memorized describing His nature. I liked the alliteration of it. Omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence.
The belief that God's awareness encompasses all those slippery details and outcomes and causes and resolutions is both staggering and comforting. Sort of like a rainbow after a flood.
