When Doing Poorly is Doing Well

RIP Great Aunt Helen

My great aunt Helen Hall passed away a few days ago at the impressive age of 95 years. She had lived alone, but infirm, for several years. Although, not so long ago she was driving and living her life as she wished. I noticed, in helping to gather her things, that her driver’s license only expired in February of this year.

I recall that no matter what Helen was doing in public, she always put on lipstick and dressed well. She was very distressed when her hair was a mess. She was well known to flirt with one of her older physicians who was about her age. She passed him candy in the office, which he took happily as a kind of sweet language between them.

Helen spent most of her life single, and lived many years with one of her sisters, Irene. She was loving towards nephews and nieces. I recall the kindness that both of them always showed to me when I was a small child, always referring to me by my full name, “Keith Edwin.” Like so many such aunts, she was always putting a snack or money into my small hand. Helen took care of herself, worked for decades for a financial company, had a bit of retirement and by all indicators was truly a force of nature.

She must of been quite a sight when she was younger. In her things is a small autograph book from high school, and the kind words about her, scribbled nearly 80 years ago by men and women mostly long gone, reflect a woman beloved in her youth as much as in her age.

I also knew that Helen was a devoted Christian who loved to read her well-worn Bible and regularly prayed. Too weak and in too much pain (from an old cervical spine fracture) she could not attend church services later in life. Nevertheless she would watch them on television, in addition to her personal devotions, in the privacy of her small apartment where she lived with her dog, Jamie. Her faith was lived out in her kindness to the people she knew; she never thought ill of the people around her. She bore her cross of physical pain with grace, never taking it out on anyone, nor ever (that I recall) raging against fate with questions like “why me?”

Towards the end of her life, due to a variety of illnesses, Helen was in a nursing home, and then in hospice care. As I had become her medical power of attorney, I was in frequent contact with the staff of the hospice house and with other family members.

I had seen her became very sick, look like death, and then rally on any number of occasions. She was a regular hospital visitor through no fault of her own. As a physician I know that my colleagues and I often do a pretty louse job of predicting those last heart-beats. So I fully expected that any day, Helen would hop up, ask for a brush, some blush, some lipstick and have herself removed from hospice, candy in hand.

Eventually it became clear that this would not be the case. I had watched her steady decline from a stately, smiling, independent woman to a frail, sweet lady who needed constant pain medications and the assistance of others. (And who could live on Little Debbie snack cakes.)

So it was that at one point, someone called me and said, “Your Aunt Helen isn’t doing well.”

When I heard, “Helen isn’t doing well,” I thought this:

“No, Helen is doing very well and is doing exactly what she should.”

After a life of 95 years, after a life of simple goodness and faithful living, after a life of kindness and gentility, a life of self-respect and such elegance as she could attain, she was doing absolutely, perfectly well.

When she crossed out of this life, I felt a twinge of sadness because I knew that I would miss her, and so would my mother. (She was the last living sibling of my maternal grandmother’s family.)

But I felt happy for her. I went to the hospice house and saw her, and smiled. I said “Rest in Peace, we love you.” And as a fellow Christian, I believe that she is at rest. I believe that I will see her again. That she will be both recognizable and almost unfathomably different at that reunion. I know that her abdomen will not be swollen and her bones will not be sore, that her step will not require a walker and her voice will be strong. I imagine that her hair will be perfect and will be unperturbed by heavenly winds. I doubt if she will need, or desire, any makeup. I will not be surprised if she offers me candy. “Keith Edwin, have a piece of this, it’s wonderful!”

This imagery is a thing we Christians do all too poorly. Resting so comfortably in modern temporal comfort, in advanced medical care, living far longer than our ancestors, we’ve come to see the end of this life as just that; an end of all things good. And I know, grief is hard. But if we believe what we say we believe, then Helen’s hospice house was really more of a labor and delivery suite as she was born into another, better, fuller life.

St. Paul said, in 1 Corinthians 15:19: “If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.”

It is this absolute emphasis on this life that makes us consume ourselves with politics and culture. Not that those things aren’t of some importance, but we believers should see them as ephemeral and transient things when held up against an eternal existence.

I was blessed to have her, to have her whole vast family, as part of mine. And part of the lives of my wife and children, all of whom saw and met and knew Helen for the kind woman she was.

Fortunately, we haven’t lost her forever.

(I’d like to point out that she was unselfish to the end. It was long her wish that her physical form be donated to my alma mater, the West Virginia University School of Medicine. Having already registered for this, her wishes were honored. And myself having had the privilege of learning anatomy on bodies graciously donated, I can only say “thanks so much.”)