Hesed
My mom was a farm girl in rural Tennessee. She studied hard by day, tended the fields after school, and helped care for her 8 siblings. After graduating from high school, she gathered her courage and nine dollars and boarded a bus for Nashville. She worked her way through nursing school, became a Registered Nurse, and served in the newborn ward of Nashville General Hospital where she met my father, a young doctor.
She always said she loved nursing. Her care for others was also evident in her endeavors as a wife, mother, and (later in life) an accomplished real estate agent. Then she was struck by vascular dementia. Almost overnight, at age 70, she had to hand over her car keys and face the terrifying prospect of a progressive, incurable disease that would steal her memories and still her active lifestyle.
This season with her has been filled with heartache, surpassing even the loss of my dad to cancer, as I’ve observed her degeneration over these last 14 years. The woman who sat with me countless evenings, side by side, completing crossword puzzles – one working the Winston-Salem Journal puzzle and the other the Sentinel puzzle – can no longer remember her own name much less a three-letter word for “Gershwin brother.” (Ira, by the way.) We would stay up late into the night talking for hours, solving all the world’s problems. If only the White House had known! Now she studies my face and asks who I am.
Only brief glimmers of my precious mother and deep friendship with her remain. And I’m loving her and caring for her as best I can. She has remained generally sweet-natured, and we’ve found excellent care for her. The hardest parts are overcoming my own grief at seeing her condition and managing the geographical distance that separates us.
While I’ve read many books about this “journey down the path not chosen,” few authors have captured the emotional toll for patients and their care partners as well as Keeping Love Alive as Memories Fade by Gary Chapman, Deborah Barr, and Edward Shaw. The authors are realistic about the challenges of loving and serving someone with advanced dementia. Many people are aware of the most common symptom: short-term memory loss.
But what they often fail to comprehend are some of the other symptoms including paranoid delusions, hallucinations, emotional disengagement, depression and a variety of behavioral and attitudinal problems, depending on what part of a patient’s brain is being damaged.
In the book, Chapman acknowledges how alzheimers and other dementia diseases unravel the tapestry of relationships that have been woven over the years. He encourages us to press on in love: “It is the mission of our book, however, to assert that the application of intentional love is powerful and beautiful, worth applying even to a tapestry that will inevitably fully unravel.”
This kind of love, he writes, is called hesed in Hebrew. There’s no great English equivalent, but it combines the ideas of love, loyalty and faithfulness in action. Chapman elaborates that claiming to have feelings you don’t have is hypocritical, but “if you express an act of love that is designed for the other person’s benefit or pleasure, it is simply a choice . . . This is hesed, the choice-driven, sacrificial expression of love.”
Sloss Furnaces, founded in the late 1800s in Birmingham, Alabama. All the ingredients needed to make iron were found within 30 miles of the city. Coal, limestone, dolomite and clay. These elements were mined and brought to Sloss by rail, where the blast furnaces produced tons of pig iron.
Though grieved, I’m thankful for the opportunities to love and serve my mom, who was such a fabulous mother. And I began thinking beyond my situation. In more general terms, how do we, as Christians, put hesed – longstanding, active, steadfast love –into practice with those who can’t respond and may even reject us? How do we steel our wills and go even further — pray for our enemies, forgive a betrayer, or put a stranger’s needs ahead of our own?
Romans 12:1 gives a clue: Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship.”
As Sinclair Ferguson points out in the video Romans in 40 Minutes, Paul devotes 11 chapters to indicatives, the truth of what God has done, is doing and will do. Almost all of Paul’s imperatives, his commands, fall into the last five chapters. This verse (Romans 12:1) sits right between the two sections. The first section establishes the mercy of God toward humans as He calls us into relationship with Him through faith in Jesus Christ. Then, in the first verse of chapter 12, Paul begins with the phrase “in view of God’s mercy”. Our view, our perspective, on His great mercy, all He has done for us in Christ, is the crucial ingredient for our ability to show grace to others. His grace makes us grace-full. If we want to love and serve with joy, with consistency, without weariness, then we need to pause and remember God’s mercies. Understanding His mercy will renew our minds and empower our doing. As my friend Emily likes to say, “Preach the gospel to yourself every day.”
We love because He first loved us.
I John 4:19