The lights are on, but...

 “But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame.”

Fantine – Les Miserables

The Musical

There is a quietness when nobody is home.  The rooms once filled with activity, laughter and love – now curiously still.  We are gifted, or maybe cursed, with a sense of sameness, a feeling of constancy in an ever-changing world.  It helps us cope, providing a kind of internal security.  In fact nothing is the ever same…everything changes.  It is easy to be fooled until you enter the house when nobody is home.

Riley met me at the door as always, with the wild enthusiasm of a puppy.  Her ten years seemed to have done nothing to dampen her excitement.  She looked quickly past me as if to say, “Where’s Nance?  Did you bring her? Is she still in the car?  Is she getting the luggage?” 

Nancy has not been home now for the better part of a month; she won’t be coming home again.  I had an overwhelming desire for Riley to understand her closest companion would not return.  You often hear stories of animals so loving of their masters, they pine the rest of their live at the loss.  Riley gave me her best effort, but we both knew I was a poor substitute for that gentle soul with whom she had lived her entire life.

While Riley had always had a special place in my sister’s heart, the last few years as she began her unrelenting slip into darkness, Riley was her best friend. Before any of us knew the thunderclouds were gathering, Riley was there for comfort with all her small heart could give.  Before we understood the disease was robbing my sister of her life by inches…Riley knew.  They ate together, watched television together, slept together, spending every day in each other’s company.  When we struggled for patience in Nancy’s circular, repetitive world, Riley did not!  In the most patient of ways, she would sit, with the rapt attention of a long lost friend, enthralled by my sister’s disconnected monologues.

In the last few years, with minor exception, the two of them were always together.  Getting Nancy to leave the house for dinner or a movie, without taking Riley, required all the diplomatic skill one could muster.  Riley – the only constant in my sister’s withering world...and now she is gone.

How does one know what is right and wrong in these situations?  For a second time this devastating disease has taken a loved one.  Irony hangs in the air like a dense fog, as I recall how the girls and I labored over these decisions with mother.  While all of us struggled, it was Nancy who carried the brunt, in the day to day management of Mum – before an assisted living ‘solution’ loomed large in her future.  It is said, “…if you want to know what’s up ahead, ask someone on their way back…”  The problem, of course, the ‘…what’s up ahead…’ is different for each person, each time.  In some ways, there is no ‘...on their way back...’  My sister is NOT my mother and this dance, while forecasting a similar endgame, is very different this time.  Agonizing decisions…when they should be made, and with what right – the only similarity.  Under the angst of the day-to-day decision making process, these are the broad-brush strokes that haunt the soul.  From the moral perspective, when one sees the decline of thought and function – the intimate knowing and loving perspective, and before God…when is it right to take the reins? 

The flight from the West was without incident as it has been every six weeks or so over the past couple of years.  The tornado warnings so frequent in this part of the world, lifted just long enough to make a safe landing into St. Louis.  The drive to Jefferson City was without incident, and I arrived as so often before.

My dear sister, of course, was not there.  She is now under the care of an assisted living facility and I will see her today for the first time since being with her in her home, a scant few weeks ago. 

There is a quietness when nobody is home…nothing is the ever same…everything changes.  It is easy to be fooled until you enter the house when nobody is home.

 

- ted