|
 A Thought On Sunday
THINKING ABOUT TERESA
From the desk of, Fr. Ignatius Waters c.p.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
I'm thinking about Teresa. Her husband died a few months ago. He'd been suffering from Alzheimer's and other ailments for many years. She had to watch him constantly or he would wander off. Her life was all about him.
Yesterday she talked about herself for the first time. It's as if she'd forgotten who she was. For fifty years and more her life had been her husband and her family, thinking about them, worrying about them, planning for them. In recent years she didn't have a minute to herself as she took on the added roles of nurse, carer and guard!
Now all she can do – all she wants to do - is sit and remember. It's as if she's catching her breath. Trying to catch up with where she is now. She is in grief of course but also a kind of shock at the sudden loss of the many roles that gave meaning to her life – wife, mother, carer, nurse, cook and comforter. She is sitting there in a daze remembering the young girl she was (just 16!) when she came to Dublin to work. All the way from Cork and missing home and the support of her family. She's remembering her happy marriage to Johnny, the birth of the children and the many miscarriages. All that time, the bike was her only transport.
And now before she's really had time enough to go over it all, they came some time back, giving her a panic button to hang round her neck and other security gadgets and advice. All kind and well meaning, of course, but only adding to her stress and panic; in fact causing her more stress than all the years of working and caring when she knew what she was about. Now she doesn't know who she is and they seem to think that suddenly she's now the patient and not the nurse! Talk about a life being turned upside down!
Some friends want her to move out more and do things but she's not ready for that yet. She just wants to sit day by day and look out the window and think and remember and try to make sense of it all.
The family come and go but she's long hours on her own, something she was never used to and she doesn't see all her thinking and remembering as praying. But it is. It can be.
We all need to take time for reflection and pondering in the midst of busy active and 'noisy' lives. Mary seems to have managed, in the midst of life, 'to ponder in her heart' on all that was happening in her young life. Before the crib is removed for another year, give yourself time to ponder on it. Allow yourself to be filled with wonder as you look on this small helpless baby. This is the way the great Creator God chose to make his home among us. Why? Maybe so that we wouldn't be afraid of him, so that we would feel at home with him; so that we could come to him with confidence knowing we won't be rejected; that we will be understood and accepted and loved. Ponder on it all yourself!
|
