I sat beside the bed of a dear friend a few days ago. Well into his eighties, he resides in a convalescent center. I have watched his health decline over the past several years, but I remember him when he was a spry gentleman, quite active, who could easily take care of himself. Now he is unable to get out of bed by himself - a place where he now spends almost all of his time. His skin is wrinkled with age and patched with discolorations, rashes, and various sores.
I spent about 45 minutes with my friend and the entire time I was there, another resident on the same floor lay in her room and yelled over and over, "Help me, help me, help me." Her mind had long since failed to serve her properly and she could not be consoled. The halls smelled of medicine and even death. Weekly, beds there are emptied as residents pass away. It is a frightening place, I would imagine, to anyone who isn't accustomed to the destructive nature of our years.
I remember as a child going to visit my great-grandmother who lived in an ancient gothic structure, a place called "The Gorge," so named because of its location, tucked away in a forest valley. Bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling in the resident's rooms and incapacitated elderly men and women lined the hallways in wheel chairs. Occasionally, they would reach out at me as I walked by. They scared me to death and so did the facility, but my mother and father insisted that my great-grandmother would want to see me. They were right, of course.
This may seem like an odd topic for a column about children, but as I sat with my friend, listening to him tell stories of World War II, and I watched him drift in and out of sleep, I saw something in him that many people would miss. I did not see his gray hair or his tired and frail body. I saw my friend whom I love dearly, much as one might see a mother or father, remembering them as they used to be, and seeing far beyond the wretchedness that might frighten one who could not know any better. My compassion for my friend made it impossible for his condition to frighten me away.
There is most definitely a lesson here. My children occasionally accompany me when I visit friends in the hospital or elderly people who are unable to leave their homes. I do not force them to go, but sometimes it takes some encouragement. Like me when I was their age, the foreign nature of a hospital or convalescent center with its sights, sounds, and smells, as well as the enigma of age, dying, and death, can be frightening to them.
Yet when they go with me, they see that the elderly do love to see children, just like my mother told me. Yet I want my children to learn more than this. Not only do I want them to learn to give of themselves occasionally, but I also want them to learn to see beyond appearances. I want them to learn to look at other people with a compassionate eye, one that sees beyond wrinkles, frailness, and sickness. If they can learn to do that, they can also learn to see beyond skin color, religious differences, and life-style choices. By going with me to visit the aged, like my friend, my children have the opportunity to learn from them. It is amazing that my friend, incapable of caring for himself and sometimes even finding it difficult to keep his mind focused on a simple conversation - this man who will most likely never see my children as adults - can still be their teacher.
