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Benedictions at the Threshold

1/9/2024

By Kellie Brown

A sharp thwack startles me from the chair, and my body instinctively readies to take cover from whatever ill besieges us. It only takes another second for my brain to process that a hickory nut has dropped onto the tin roof of my in-laws’ porch. My mother-in-law laughs at my response and then, to make me feel better, says, “I jump just as high every time even though I live here.” It isn’t true, but it’s a kindness, and not of the variety she has always been generous with during our 35-year relationship. But individual lives and relationships don’t stay static. They are always changing, sometimes for the better, other times not.

What remains unchanged on this back porch is its mixture of rustic and modern décor—a primary-colored plastic whirligig, a rusted dinner bell, a rough-hewn bird house, a gas grill we enjoyed in better times. Mounted on the overhead beams, license plates stretching across many decades and states frame this patchwork porch. The backyard is still lush with greenery, a true suburban rainforest of trees, ferns, and blooming flora. A large round thermometer hangs underneath a Tennessee license plate and declares it 88 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Even with the high humidity, this is tolerable for a July afternoon in upstate South Carolina.

What feels changed is that she and I have never been older than we are at this moment—me 53, she 81. And her husband, my father-in-law, has never been this frail and this close to eternity. My husband and I, along with our adult son, have driven from Tennessee to attend the slow death watch that is dementia.

The jolt from the falling nut serves as a prescient starter pistol for the discussion she and I begin, first subtly in hints and in phrases that drop off at the end. We sit side by side looking out toward the yard, but as the conversation grows more earnest, we turn in our chairs to make eye contact and to confirm each for the other that he can no longer be cared for at home, that the time for a skilled nursing facility has arrived. Conversations about the necessity of this have been going on for over a year. Two times an opening at the Veterans Affairs facility came available, only for her to backpedal and say, “No, I’m not ready.” I understand it’s difficult. They have been married almost 60 years. This decision carries an immutability with it as a dress rehearsal for the more final exit.

Day after day of tugging to move him in and out of beds and chairs has taken a toll on her physically. Answering the same question every 60 seconds and bargaining with him to eat or drink have taken their toll emotionally. He has always been a man who expected to get his way, whether at home, at work, or at church. It just presents now without any polish or camouflage. His disease-spawn confusion quickly leads to frustration, paranoia, and belligerence. But it has never been as bad as it is this weekend. The powder keg tension in the house is difficult for my empathic self to handle. Time drags on at a glacial pace even as I try to distract myself with crossword puzzles, social media, and kitchen snack excursions. I can’t imagine the slowness of the hours for him, recliner-bound during the day, wrestling to put words together in a way that means something to him and to us. “It’s just three o’clock?” he asks. Yes, three o’clock going on forever.

The past few years have been my only experience with this disease’s insidious unraveling of the mind and body. Both my grandmothers became widows before this age, their husbands dying instantly of heart attacks on the eve or just following retirement. Plans for that anticipated time together were thwarted. It also meant that neither had to witness and try to stave off their spouse’s mental decline. But the shock kind of widowhood exacts a price as well. One grandmother seemed better suited to find contentment in her solitude; the other only found it in pills.

On the second day of our South Carolina visit, I suggest that my husband and son be left to manage so my mother-in-law can have a break. As I’m walking out the door, my son calls, “Don’t be gone long.” His voice is tinged with the concern that comes from being ill-equipped to handle all the potential difficulties. Assuring him that “We won’t be long,” I drive her to a local thrift store she loved to browse before her spouse’s infirmity made her mostly homebound as well. We roam the aisles as she leans heavily on a shopping cart. The building is stuffy and reeks of unwashed armpits. Whatever air conditioning it has can’t compensate for the 95-degree day. We admire fluted crystal dishes and flip through former bestsellers. I’m excited to discover a vinyl record section, only to despair as it offers mostly Pat Boone or The Mantovani Orchestra. I walk through their perpetual Christmas display with Santa-themed clothing and décor, but I’ve never been able to get interested in Christmas till the calendar reads November. After 30 minutes, we have completed our slow circuit of the store, and she heads to the checkout with two novels that I put into her hands. I know that she would enjoy both and also that they will most likely sit unread in a stack collecting dust. Regrettably, I leave empty handed, having found nothing to spark joy.

Back at the house, I retreat to the bedroom to rest for a few minutes. The living room television is blaring a baseball game, and I counter with a Mozart playlist on my phone. It’s all slow movements from his piano concertos, which have a centering and healing influence on me. I prop up on two pillows and open the book I’m reading. It’s Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, a title that seems fitting given the situation, and her words do as well. She writes about “one’s own mournful horror.” She confesses that “the bad news of the world, like most bad news, has no place to go. You tack it to the bulletin board part of your heart. You say look, you say see that is all.”

The next morning I’m up before anyone else, which is how it always is. I adore early morning vibes, and my back has a limit to what it will tolerate on unforgiving mattresses. I slip on my tennis shoes and pad through the house. Condensation trails down the French doors that lead to the porch, an indication that there will be no break in the humidity for today. I ease them open as quietly as I can and step out onto the brick floor. I’m prepared for the nuts this morning, but even so, I have small startles from their escapist plunges. Other than the occasional nut, it’s peaceful on the porch. The extended drought means that no one is up early cutting the grass “before it gets too hot,” and there is no breeze to cue the tubular wind chimes into their lonesome melodic peal. Only birdsong lofts up through the stillness— finches, sparrows, and cardinals singing in the dawn chorus and accompanied by the obligato chirping of frogs.

The morning stiffness in my back persists, so I walk around the wide porch and examine its hodgepodge of items as if seeing them for the first time. I genuinely wonder where each came from and imagine them arranged with typed labels in a glass museum display. What I’m most curious about this moment is the old-fashioned wooden crutch, like you would expect Tiny Tim to use, that is nailed upside down on a wooden support beam near the “Welcome to the Porch” sign. I’ve always said this porch is a treasure trove for poets.

I’m also interested in the face that has been arranged on the trunk of a large maple tree. Made from separate resin parts for eyes, nose, and mouth, it is like an arboreal Mr. Potato Head. The mouth is full and fixed somewhere between happiness and surprise. The hooded eyes are intense in their gazing, and the nose generous as if to inhale fully nature’s sacred incense. It could have just walked here from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I think about Treebeard, a member of the treelike sentient species known as the Ent. He is described as “the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth.” Treebeard is wise, and his longevity has garnered much insight about time and providence, including the observation that “Things will go as they will; and there is no need to hurry to meet them.” There is acceptance in that proverb that feels necessary for our present family situation.

As I stare into the dew-soaked yard, my mind replays some of the difficult scenes from the previous evening. We all sat together in the living room as we have for decades, a place for swapping stories, sharing updates, and making plans. But among the many shifts is the altered soundscape, its absence of ticking. The house is filled with old regulator clocks that my father-in-law collected and took great care in keeping wound and in good working order. Their persistent, slightly asynchronous ticking drove me crazy like an unsettling homage to composer György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique, a 1962 work for 100 mechanical metronomes. But now these clocks stand frozen in time, yet their faces stare as silent witnesses to the ravages of time.

Last night my father-in-law’s dementia led him to hurl cruel words toward his wife, who has been a tireless caretaker. She tried a sigh and a shake of the head to disguise her true reaction, but it was obvious to me, a recipient of a lifetime of abusive words from my own mother, that this verbal barb lodged in that sore, wounded place that no amount of rationalizing about the speaker’s illness can assuage. The only respite we got last night was one moment of comic relief. Due to rheumatoid arthritis, my mother-in-law walks now with a prominent limp that makes it appear as if one leg is longer than the other. As she dutifully trudges back and forth to the kitchen, her effort is noticeable every time, but her husband only caught it once in a brief moment of clarity.

“Are you walking that way natural?” he asked in a tone of earnest curiosity.

She snorted and countered, “Well, I’m sure not walking like a duck on purpose!”

The room erupted in laughter, the kind of cleansing guffaws that are genuine and long overdue. In her memoir The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, Wendy Welch writes, “Where there is giggling, there is hope.” Those words feel like a sacred liturgy for times such as these, and so I add my unspoken Amen.

Finished with my morning porch meander, I settle down in my usual chair and scoot its position so I’m not staring directly into the rising sun. Now I can get on with my real reason for being out here this morning—to enter into divine presence on behalf of my father-in-law. When reflecting on the loss of his wife to Parkinson’s disease, theologian Hugh Vernon White said, “Sometimes someone we love moves away from us even before they die, but they do not move out of the attention of God. God’s love is his attention.” I believe that “nothing can separate us from the love of God,” that our God “neither slumbers nor sleeps,” that God “will never leave us or forsake us.” And yet I’m carrying around that all too familiar feeling of being so burdened by my own health problems, family issues, unrelenting work demands, and our world’s suffering that it’s hard to connect with God’s promises or even form a prayer. How do any words suffice? A few days ago, I reread that passage in Romans 8 that promises that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words.” What a comfort to remember that not only does the Holy Spirit reside in me but also intercedes on my behalf in a mysterious divine language spoken only by the Triune God.

Recently, I exchanged texts with a dear friend that included her saying, “I’m out of words.” I replied, “Me, too.” We were referring to prayer, although this conversation could have also applied to any news broadcast we’d seen. She and I are both drawn to contemplative prayer practices, which require us to surrender our need to talk at or to God and instead to sit in stillness so God can do all the speaking. It sounds easy, even relaxing, but it isn’t. Our human desire to control the dialogue clashes with this type of prayer even though scripture reminds us again and again of God’s preference for a relationship grounded in stillness—“Be still before the Lord” (Psalm 37:7); “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). I am often drawn back to the story of Elijah’s personal encounter with God and what that teaches about our misguided expectations of the boisterous and dramatic. “But the Lord was not in the wind…not in the earthquake…not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

I believe that a healthy prayer life is about balance, similar to how we provide nourishment for our physical bodies. Sometimes prayer is lighting a candle and waiting in silence. Sometimes it’s writing or walking in nature. When I’m seeking words as a traditional prayer practice, I often turn to the poets who know more about prayer than most theologians. Mary Oliver tells us to “pay attention, then patch/a few words together and don't try/to make them elaborate, this isn't/a contest but the doorway/into thanks.” I also find voice through the tried-and-true script of the Book of Common Prayer. So, this morning, I decide to start there.

O God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth,
  Have mercy upon us.
O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
  Have mercy upon us.
O God the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the faithful,
  Have mercy upon us.

Dr. Kellie Brown is a violinist, conductor, music educator, poet and award-winning writer whose book, The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation during the Holocaust and World War II (McFarland Publishing, 2020), received one of the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles award. Her words have appeared in Earth & Altar, Ekstasis, Psaltery & Lyre, Still, Clayjar Review, and others. In addition to over 30 years of music ministry, she serves as a certified lay minister in the United Methodist Church. More information about her and her writing can be found at www.kelliedbrown.com.

Kellie's other work on Foreshadow:
Refrain (Poetry, January 2024)

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