The Old Lady and Religion

My father is in a nursing home, and has been for nearly eleven years now, succumbing to the slow and indignifying disease of dementia. Multi-infarct pre-senile dementia to be exact. It was hard to tell exactly when the disease started to eat away at his brain partly because he was into spiritualism in his late forties - and we all thought him a bit barmy as a consequence. In retrospect I often think that his journey into spiritualism may have been the result of him coming to grips with the hallucinations and other non-sequiters of early-stage dementia - attributing his visions to things of religious significance rather than to dissolving neurons.

This thoughtnode is not about my father - more on him in later blogs - but rather at a 20 second incident that happened at his nursing home way back in 1999. It's so strange how things stick in one's memory. Even more so considering that I have always thought that my own memory to be poor and that I, perhaps, am witnessing my own future through the gradual degradation of my father's mind.

I was visiting dad one weekend morning with my mother. Dad was lucky enough to have his own room right next door to the nursing station, and as this area was located at the centre of an essentially long rectangular building, it proved to be a traffic hot-spot for the residents. Some were just old and infirm, others were more mobile but senile. Some of these were in a happy state of oblivion but the ones I felt sorry for were the those that appeared tortured. Some would mumble with a distressed look on their face, others would cry out - some appearing to recall childhood life at the hands of a forceful parent - you could hear the anguish in their cries.

I was standing in the corridor outside of my dad's room - I found it hard visiting him and was letting mum spend some time with him. This old gray haired lady shuffled up to me in her blue slippers with a look of worry on her face as well as a tear or two. I asked her if she was OK and she told me what was troubling her. It turns out that her husband had died some time earlier and he was an Anglican. She, on the other hand, was Catholic and she was worried that when she died she would never see her husband again as her priest had always told her that only true Catholics go to Heaven. In response I told her that as they both believed-in and followed the teachings of Jesus that they would both be together again in Heaven. I remember her face brightening up with a smile so strong that it nearly brought me to tears (in fact I'm pretty close as I write this). She hugged me, thanked me and shuffled off. That was the first time and the last time I ever saw that lady. I hope that she is at peace with her husband in Heaven.