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Saturday, March 2, 2013

My Hands And Feet

Yesterday, I wound up spending part of the afternoon having coffee with a friend and I’m still sort of processing the whole event in my head.  He and I, only little more than a year ago, would hike for miles in the wooded trails of our mountains here together.  Last year, his wife started to deteriorate rather quickly. Her mind is going and she can barely get around with her walker now.  He has been struggling with the difficulties of managing her life as well as his own.  Last fall he had to have a procedure on his heart to stop an annoying arrhythmia that was troubling him, and in the process they blew a hole in his ventricle.  They had him on bypass and quickly got a surgeon to crack him open and sew it up, but what with the damage and infection issues he now, months later, finds himself barely able to walk 20 feet without stopping for air.  Talking even seems difficult at times, and he is still having to struggle with legal and other issues to take care of things in the event he passes away and his wife is still around or if they both die.  Just cooking and cleaning is a problem and he is working on getting home health assistance through various sources to counter that. He has friends that are trying to help, but the sad part is his only child and her family live and work 2,000 miles away.

He is only 73 and was such a vibrant man that it is really heartbreaking to see this happen.  I find it sad to watch what struggles aging presents to us, and though I’m glad I can be there for him, I wish I could make it all better and make them well again.

I think we’ve lost something in our modern American world.  Our connectedness to the ones we love is often broken by hundreds if not thousands of miles of separation.  So often we no longer have three generations of families living together or at least in close proximity.  We communicate sporadically by phone and mail.  We see each other at holidays if we are fortunate.  We rely on dispassionate strangers and organizations to render the assistance we need.  More than ever with those kind of lifestyle decisions we need compassionate Christian fellowship to take the place of what families used to provide.  That connectedness and support of relationship that God built us to function with must be there for us to be whole.  We must be Jesus Christ to the world we live in.

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