Welcome to the Departure Lounge is a new book by Meg Federico about the last two years of her mother’s life. If you’ve ever dealt with a dying person, home-health care, aging parents, dementia, and trying to balance all of the above with the demands of your own middle age existence, you’ll appreciate this book.
A paragraph that resonated with me was a description of Walter, the author’s step-dad who suffers from dementia/Alzheimer’s. Walter had just appeared wearing a jacket and pants from two different suits. The mismatched outfit only highlighted his confusion.
“Slowly the bewildering nature of his experience revealed itself to me. In a nutshell, the fog had rolled in. He couldn’t really see back to where he’d been in his life and he clearly couldn’t see what lay ahead. And where he was right now didn’t quite add up. Sometimes a landmark popped out of the fog, but before he could make a positive identification, it was lost in roiling, gray bewilderment.”
Where’s the grace of God when a person must live out their final years in a fog? Where’s the grace of God for those who must care for them? I don’t have answers. Life is unfair. Things go wrong. Our health can rob us of the joy of doing so many things we once dreamed of doing. But to live in a constant state of confusion seems the cruelest injustice of all. Especially for those around you who still know their spouses name and how to match jackets and pants. For the care-givers, the only confusion is: why is this happening?
Yet, in the midst of a season in which we struggle to find the grace, it’s availability becomes ever more clear.
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