What Remains
These readings address so many themes like equity and conversion of heart, but they are fundamentally about the end of life. For the past few years, my husband and I have been caring for a family member with dementia. on the hardest days, we have turned to each other and asked, “what is dignified about this?” At other times, we have been able to share in tiny moments of recognition and gratitude. Last week, he asked me, “do you think we remember all this after we die?”
It is a thought that I have been carrying in these days. Will we remember the most difficult days, the struggles, the frustrations? Will we share in these embarrassments, these vulnerabilities? Will we look back with regret? Will she remember how it felt to forget and become a child again?
These are questions with no easy answers. As God reminds us, God’s thoughts are so high above our thoughts that we can never grasp them during our time on earth. But wouldn’t it be such a gift if, in the end, we were able to see ourselves as God does: each of us struggling to grasp what it means to be human, to live with dignity, and to treat others with compassion? And wouldn’t it be an even greater gift to offer one another this grace of recognition, knowing that each of us is striving and failing to live out this dignity – and that the pursuit of closeness with God was enough all along?
We can never see the world as God does. We can never know the thoughts of God. Sometimes all we have are these quiet moments of remembering our dependence on one another and on God’s grace.
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