1984 March/April issue Part 2

About My Mother

The last newsletter told of my mother’s having had cranial surgery. I spent thanksgiving weekend with her in the hospital. It was hard to see her thin, weak, and disoriented- she whom I think of as quick-witted and alive. She will be eighty-five in June, and that kind of surgery took a great deal out of her.

Early in the morning on Thanksgiving Day I woke in her lovely little apartment at the Quarryville Presbyterian Home (she was in a hospital in nearby Lancaster, Pennsylvania). I looked around the room, so filled with her character (pictures, curios, everything exquisitely neatly arranged), I could not help wondering if she would be able to come back there. On the desk her piles of Christmas cards were lying, family letters stacked nearby, ready to be answered, and a little scrawled note to herself, reminding her of the number of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to whom she planned to send several crisp new dollar bills apiece.

My Psalm for the day was the sixty-third: “Thy true life is better than love; therefore I will sing Thy praises. …When I call Thee to mind upon my bed, and think on Thee in the watches of the night, remembering how Thou hast been my help and that I am safe in the shadow of Thy wings, then I humbly follow Thee with all my heart.” I told myself that I must not dwell on things seen, but on things unseen, and a lovely reminder of those things unseen, a verse specially for mother, came when I turned to Psalm 45:13, “In the place honor awaits her. She is a King’s daughter, arrayed in cloth-of-gold richly embroidered.”

When I went to see her later that morning, I read her the passages. I asked her what reasons for thanksgiving she could think of, and she came up with quite a long list. We sang together some of her favorite hymns, such as “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” “All the Way My Savior Leads Me,” “Praise the Savior, Ye Who Knows Him,” and “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” She couldn’t quite reach the tunes now and then, but she remembered nearly every word of every stanza. The Lord was there. I was sure He was, and I was strengthened. I think she was too.

As I write now (early December) she I out of the hospital and in the convalescent wing of the Quarryville Home, improving a little every day, looking forward to returning to her own apartment.