Monday Morning Music Ministry

1-15-24

I have shared the story many times, but not here, of my mother’s passing; or to skirt the euphemism, her death. She would have been a hundred years old next year, and died a couple decades ago. The circumstances attending her death were fairly remarkable, but all the times I have shared the story my contexts were medical, statistical, and with emotions bouncing like a pinball between sad and astonishing and humorous.

But a friend recently saw them in a spiritual context. Through the years I certainly appreciated the spiritual component, but not the lessons worth sharing. Cue Paul Harvey’s “Now you’ll know the rest of the story…”

My parents had moved to Florida as many retirees are wont to do; my two sisters and I remained up north, visiting on occasion. The occasions grew frequent, however, when Mom’s health slipped precipitously. She had been a lifelong Christian, church-going and always devoted to Jesus. Not affecting her salvation but affecting her health were also unfortunate lifelong devotions to cigarettes and booze.

Smoking and drinking accelerated her decline from various ailments, although, oddly, her lungs and liver were about the only things that worked right as she eventually was placed on a hospice list. I hope it is not a “spoiler” to any reader to share that hospice is not a get-well regimen: it is, formally, a recognition that the patient is dying, and is designed to make those final days or months comfortable, not expecting a cure.

Mom was put in home-hospice care with visiting nurses; my sisters and I rotated visits to Florida to help Dad and say our good-byes. Stubbornly, it seemed, my mother got weaker, and stronger; she grew foggy, then lucid; she wasted away but hung on. Each of our “good-byes” were in fact “so longs,” as my sisters and I returned again and again.

During one of my visits a kindly neighbor said, “It must be hard to lose your mother…” I replied: “It’s almost impossible!”

However Mom did go downhill until she was barely conscious. In a virtual coma. We were able to put a chip of ice or bit of Jell-O between her lips, only a few times a day. She exhibited several of the “signs of impending death” the Hospice booklet listed. Finally for two solid days there was not a sign of life from her beyond a weak pulse.

Then one night – I slept on the living-room sofa next to her hospital bed – she made a faint gurgling sound. No other signs or movement. Almost 24 hours later, she mumbled; no discernible words, but an apparent attempt. On the next morning, there were words, but random and unconnected.

Over the next days she managed more ice chips and Jell-O and even broth. And she spoke words. Sentences. They made sense. I’ll tell you how much sense: they were Bible verses. Fragments at first, then random, then full verses, but as if in her sleep.

Bible verses! Mom was not opening her eyes or making eye contact at first; but she was reciting passages from the Bible. Soon she recognized us, spoke our names… but rather than asking where she was, or why we looked so concerned, she just recited Bible verses. Eventually, lines from hymns.

I will leap ahead, so to speak. Mom recovered her strength. The bed was put aside. She resumed a life, slowly (she moved around the house, but with a walker). She gained some weight. She never had eaten much, but now she did eat and even cooked – we all had a Florida Thanksgiving reunion where she prepared a full meal. She did not resume drinking, and I was grateful that my kids were able finally to know their Oma – sober, and tender and funny, as I had known her in my own childhood.

She lived almost a full “bonus” year before a natural death overtook her. Hospice nurses said that patients were known to live maybe six months after being “listed,” but they scarcely knew of bounce-backs like Mom’s, much less of a full year.

But when I told Mom of her “bounce-back” while she seemingly was unconscious… she was as incredulous as nurses or neighbors were. I have said that she was religious all her life, but she knew that she never had committed all those Bible verses to memory.

“Rick, some of them I know, of course. And I’m sure I heard them all in Sunday School and church, or have read them, but I never memorized all of them! I never tried to!” I read to her the verses she recited from that deathbed… and try as she might, she could not recite them from memory again. But there had been many, and they had risen from her lips, complete and correct.

This was the story I often have told – shame on me, almost like describing magic tricks or a trained-seal act. My friend refreshed me with the spiritual lesson. What had sustained Mom when medicines did not? What “filled those empty spaces”? We witnessed an example of “the Lord worketh in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.” What lessons should the rest of us learn from this?

Psalm 119 talks about “hiding the Word in our hearts.”

I had known that verse, and always assumed it was a recommendation to memorize Bible verses. It is. But more than that, it tells us (in Isaiah 55) that “My Word that goeth forth out of My mouth shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.”

The power of God’s Word blessed my mother, even when it had been heard and processed casually. It accomplished things in her. It blessed us, and may it bless those who hear this story.

“Faith comes by hearing…” There is no seed that when planted cannot grow in mighty ways, multiply, and feed others. Let us just be the fertile soil. God will plant; the Spirit will nurture; Jesus will be glorified. Please be encouraged to keep the things of God close, even in “casual” ways, whether words, messages, songs; open to lessons the Bible offers, or Christian music you can listen to. Absorb. Share. Hide in your heart.

In the end, it wasn’t hard to lose my mother. She was ready, after a few more tasks – even if she did not fully know the assignments – at the End of the Way.

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Click: When I Get To the End Of the Way

5-9-11

The Bible never intended that Mothers Day be so close to Easter, there having been no Hallmark Cards or ProFlowers 2000 years ago. But as long as Easter is not diminished, anything that reminds us all of the special role of mothers cannot be bad.

Easter even provides special connections for us to think about. So does Christmas, the birth of Jesus, the Son of Mary. But at Easter His closest friends denied Him… but His mother did not. The foot of the cross was mostly empty except for scoffers and Roman guards… and His mother. Even (in theology whose reasoning we hear but whose blinding love we cannot quite comprehend), for a few hours even God in Heaven forsook Jesus so that the wrath for sin could be transferred from us to Him… but His mother did not forsake him.

As a man I can only guess about the love and emotions that are present in the bonds that a mother feels toward the child she bears. I know how great “second best” is – the bond that exists between child beholding mother.

No such relationship is typical, and no mother is ordinary, so if I share a couple of things for a moment here, I do not claim to speak for anybody. In fact, I invite anybody to think upon how their relationships with their Moms were different, not similar. They have to be different, because every mom is special; and all moms are exceptional.

We hear about Soccer Moms. Mine I call a Fifties Mom. She grew up in the Depression, in a family that struggled. She married after the War. In the ‘50s our family moved to the suburbs. Cookie cutter? Sort of. Many times I have gotten together with people my age, and before long we talk like we are sociologists: “Dysfunctional.” Family tensions. Parents who smoked and drank and partied, sometimes too much. Couples who fell into the required stereotypes of the era.

All that was true in our house. Regrets, I’ve had a few… and caused a few. In other words, life happens. Did the moms who survived the Depression and never knew whether their fiancés would return home from war… did they indulge their children too much? The question is, for me, whether I would have done so too. But shame on me for the years I ragged on Mom for drinking and smoking (even, yes, shame on her for no longer being the Mom I knew when my kids were young, because of the drinking) – but shame on me for not sufficiently remembering so much else. We can all dig deep and come up with similar:

I was reared in church. Every “life question” I had, my father would generally say, “you’ll figure it out,” but my mother would generally try to explain it in terms of Jesus. Not always logical, but I got the point. When I get emotional singing hymns, I think it’s because my mother did. If I choke up when the flag passes by, it’s because she did. I remember, when we didn’t have enough dinner for seconds all around, she never took another helping for herself. When it snowed and I had a paper route, she drove me around house to house. She never failed to ask, when I was away at college, what church I was going to, and if we could read from the same devotional every night, even when she knew I had put the Bible aside for awhile.

These are not clichés, or empty Hallmark sentiments. They are a fraction of the woven emotional fabric between a Christian mother and son.

I’ll tell you how empty these memories are not. At the end of her life, Mom was placed in a Hospice program. Hospice is meant to make dying easier, not to heal you. She was in a hospital bed at home, insensible, about 60 pounds, displaying several of the “signs of impending death” that the brochure told us to watch for. A couple chips of ice is all she ingested for several days. Then one night – I was sleeping at the other end of the living room – she stirred and mumbled. Eventually, more. In the next few days she was praying, reciting Bible verses, and signing hymn choruses.

… all in her sleep, or coma state, or whatever it was. She grew strong. She lived another year. We had a great Thanksgiving dinner, where she ate solid food, talked and joked. She walked around the house, with a walker, but all for the Hospice workers to say, “This is one of those stories we can’t explain…” Best of all, my kids met their clean, sober, “real” grandmother after all.

Strangest (?) of all, by the way, for all the Sunday School lessons and church choirs and youth groups in her life… after she “recovered,” as I just recounted, she could not recite a fraction of the things she did when she was reaching out for that bonus year from a coma. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t know how she did.

The Bible talks about “hiding things in our heart.” We do that, or we allow the Holy Spirit to. If you are a mother and do so, there is no way that you are not planting things in your children’s hearts too at the same time.

“Fifties Moms.” Like in the old TV sitcoms. Well… we all kind of liked those old TV sitcoms, didn’t we? And we miss those days. Maybe the black-and-white culture wasn’t so bad.

All that “stuff,” those stereotypes about Dysfunctional Families? Maybe that was the “fruit” (not speaking biblically in this sense) that some family trees bore. But fruit drops from trees, and shrivels, and dies. Maybe we should look, on Mothers Day, not so much at the fruit, but at the seeds our Moms were so determined to plant.

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Here is a song about my Mom, whom I miss every day. When Cynthia Clawson sang it, she didn’t know she was singing about my mom, and maybe yours too, but she was:

Click: My Mother’s Faith