At age 88 I Was to Have a New Life! To Do What?
Reported by Robert R. Schwarz
Five months ago while exercising alone in a physical training room in an assisted living community, I tripped and broke my left hip. During my ambulance drive to the hospital, I prayed to God that my severe pain would not be "wasted" , that it would serve some meaningful purpose... and I hoped that a somewhat selfless prayer might be an antidote.
Before I got to the emergency room , I knew my purpose in surviving this ordeal was to help--however pitifully I could--help a few hospital patients tolerate their pain.
I was suddenly amazed and turned joyful by the instantaneous thought, that for the first time in my life--Christian as I was--I had a bona fide purpose for living . Truly. at age 88, I was to have a new life!
I closed my mind that night remembering my mother's oft-given advice (sometimes with her sobbing), Robert, look for the good in people!
Sleep evaded me that night as a result of my physical pain and the nagging question of who would believe I was the least bit qualified to take on this God-given mission? My life's resume belied my qualifications. I recalled those early decades of all kinds of delinquent, immoral behavior followed by more decades of ego-driven work as a newspaper editor until, for another two years, vainly wandering into the realm of metaphysics and other searches for absolute truism about life. I soon developed a two-sided belief in Christianity by reading many celebrated Christian authors and attending churches of different denominations, but always leaving room for my flesh and a fat wallet.
After a week in a rehab center I joined my wife as a resident of the HarborChase assisted living facility in Naperville, Illinois. To my dismay, I soon saw that there would be no mission here for me to help people cope with pain; a dedicated staff would have that mission. My challenge in life, for now, was to be firm and steadfast through charitable conversations with memory-loss victims and with my locked bowels and the awesome realization that I no longer was in full control of my life as I had been for many years. I was somewhat motivated to "stick it out" by a lyric from my disciplined U.S. Army days in boot-camp: "You're in the Army Now ...!"
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful,
to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make
some
difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph
Waldo Emerson
At HarborChase there were usually two nurses. several Care-giver Companions was a nurse, sometimes two , on duty 24-7, a retired deacon resident, and a battery of cleaners and various other employees . There was variety of daily activities including a weekly communion service and a large screen televised Sunday mass celebrated by the Chicago cardinal. HarborChase for me and, likely for many of the one hundred or so residents here generated family warmth and--if one had a willing spirit--a place to love your neighbor pray in peace.
Yet, like many of America's 30,600 assisted living communities ( as reported last year by the American Helth Care Association ) , HarborChase has common financial woes that make it difficult to keep a superb staff and a halt to increased resident complaints about such things as a malfunctioning clothes washing machine or prolonged waits for morning and evening medicine dispensations.
Here, with her care-giving mother in her eighties was Trudy , a 44-year-old resident who, because of a doctor's mishap on her at age four years old, had spent her entire adult life speechless and apparently thoughtless. In the dinning room when I would glance up from my meal, I might see a deaf woman with eyes that stared constantly; a few residents with pitiful memory loss; and two very old males, one a very hard-of-hearing crusty guy and a senile oldster , both vainly trying to have a conversation. At each meal were several wheelchairs--two as sophisticated as motorcycles and one for a man with an amputated leg--and several two-wheel walkers. I believe everyone was thankful they were we are not in a nursing home.
Here I got to know "Rob" (aka Robb) Sacramental, the man who keeps much of this two-floor building tidy and clean. Rob has been a maintenance man most of his life, and now at age 67, he says he works as hard as a 20-year-old. In spite of arthritis in his lower back and scoliosis that makes him limp, he enjoys his labor at HarborChase. “The food is good, the work challenges me, we are kind and nice to each other here, and they leave me alone to do my work,” he told me. Rob has been married for 33 years and has two daughters. He loves to play pool and bowl and watch boxing but hates baseball. He enjoys watching old Hollywood movies with actors such as James Cagney and John Wayne.
Rob shared with me some memories of spending several years roaming the United States, sometimes homeless and penniless, in an attempt to gain a new identity. “One day I looked in the mirror, looking like a dead man.” At age 18, Rob had a life-defining moment soon after he interacted with members of a Mormon church and became Christian. Robb recently was employed by another assisted living community.
And 99-year-old Helen with unrelenting arthritis who, when told in a very serious tone that our world might soon come to an end, replied with a smile and a finger pointing upward, "Good. There's no place for me to go but up". She continued to eat her oatmeal.
And maintenance director William Teague, whose smile is meant to say that he can and wants to fix just about anything electrical or mechanical in your apartment, though you may have to wait your turn for two or three days. Sixty-year-old "Will" came to HarborChase with 30 years of experience that included carpentry, electrical, plumbing and mechanical work. He told me that he also attended a trade school and classes on truck driving. Anne Hoeksema, whom he refers to as “His great boss”, hired Will seven months ago. “I like working here because this is a happy family. I am a people person.” Will is married to Vicky, who manages the bistro deli here. They have five children and 13 grandchildren. Vicky is pastor of the Youth Center Church in Naperville, where Will is a deacon. Interacting with his grandchildren is what makes him happy. He becomes sad when he is unable to help anyone who asks for his technical help. Will is a large man, a bit overweight, but is now getting in shape, especially after a heart attack and open-heart surgery that put him in rehab for six months. “The heart attack changed me. I now take life more seriously and take nothing for granted.”
With Christmas Eve two weeks away, I found myself praying more often, not because of the festive season with Christmas carols resounding daily throughout the building and holiday decorations artfully placed in rooms and hallways ( my wife is an artist and teaches art) , but about me feeling more intimacy with the Lord , Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Though I had yet to see what my new Purpose is in life might be, what now seemed to matter most was embracing this intimacy. It was something I had never known, let alone believed I could know--no matter what the saints had proclaim.
“To
serve is beautiful, but only if it is done
with joy and a whole heart and a free mind."
--Pearl S. Buck
Christian faith clung to me like a tender barnacle seemingly forever at rest. But caring for my brother kept my share of faith alive. Lester, now age 74 and daily inflicted with wounds from what most psychiatrists diagnosed as incurable paranoid schizophrenia , was a veteran of three battles wnich he fought simultabously against his psychosis , nicotine addiction, and that an enemy most of fight sooner or later on the spiritual battle-front. The disease had once jailed him from for shooting at a passing car and had also hospitalized him several times since age 22. My father and I had helped Lester to obtain several jobs , which Lester soon lost. When he warmly smiled when I tacked up a Christ crucifixion cross in one of his hospital rooms and learned a few days later that he had he tore it down, I was angered and grieved that my brother, I felt, had hated Jesus and surrendered to the devil. And--for the record--in his pre-teen years we nicknamed Lester "the Lamb".
While strolling across the leaf-covered grounds of HarborRush one afternoon, these thoughts suddenly burst forth. ( I like to believe they came from my Lord ). WATCH OUT FOR PRIDE. YOU ARE ONE OF MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS. JUST GIVE YOUR SELF A D-MINUS GRADE,AND BE GRATEFUL FOR THAT. ALSO, IT'S TIME YOU DO SOMETHING TO BECOME AN ACTIVE MEMBER OF THE BODY OF CHRIST...
My prayer now often ended with, Not me but Thou -- and others !
What anchored this motto in my very soul was a life-long, unquenchable thirst for a kind of freedom I could not describe. With it came an intense joy, similar to what I felt that day ( in August , 1950 ) when I was freed from a maximum security penitentiary in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.
I was in a former Nazi POW prison for ten days, prying often that I would not be taken to a Siberian gulag for illegally crossing the Austria-Czech border, me a journalist without a passport when grabbed by Russian-commanded soldiers. My wife and I, being two tourists, had taken a country drive from Vienna and mistakenly driven down some unmapped road that ended in uninhabited farm land that ended at an abandoned World War II tank trap. Leaving my passport in my jacket in the car with my wife, I got out and took a photo of the trap before turning around. Instantly, two armed soldiers sprang from high grass and arrested me.
When , with the help of my left-behind wife Judith and a U.S. State Dept. agent in Vienna , I was freed ten days later.
The experience created in me a life-long passion for freedom, but a freedom from anything that would restrict me from behavior which I believed was moral, righteous , and legal. I pushed for this freedom as a neighbor in a middle class suburban neighborhood and as executive editor of nine weekly and twice weekly newspapers . I didn't know--and would not know until I was in my late seventies-- that at the heart of the passion ( given me by God, I believe) to be free from SELF (my self) , that kind of freedom some Christians and saints have achieved and what those celebrated desert fathers sought. I now know it is the freedom we should can acquire before we die , trusting the Lord for everything and believing this is the only way to heaven. Sadly, I had to become 88 years old before I knew this and reached out to it.
"In writing about my brother Lester , who enlisted in the U.S Air Force weeks after college gradation, made a lieutenant but, as expected, was given an honorable discharge less than a year later, I am often reminded of those ancient Hebrews who suffered a 40-year trek across a desert before they could cross the Jordan River (????) into their promised land. Caring for Lester showed me that one can sink even deeper than rock bottom and yet still rise. I saw how his suffering bore fruit at his end and for the many who stood praying at his bedside, especially when his nicotine addiction required a 24-hour lung ventilator. Watching my brother cope with intense discomfort, I saw the payoff of his early embracing of Occult and New Ago beliefs and how this can warp the mind not only of other Lesters but also the life of those whose lives we often celebrate. It helped qualify me for a year's service as president of the Maine Township Mental Health Association and a year as a police-beat reporter for the erstwhile City News Bureau of Chicago before being drafted into the U.S. Army.
“True glory consists in doing what deserves
to be written, in writing what deserves to be
read, and in so living as to make the world
happier
and better for our living in it.”
― Pliny
the Elder
Once again late at night my sleepy thoughts traveled back with gratitude of the Lord's gift of faith that took me many years to mature. This time I was reminded of my brother's final days which I want to share now with you...
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April 1, 2013... Lester's body systems began to shut down. His body could no longer assimilate his intravenous-fed nutrients. His blood system was gradually lowering , and he slept most of the time. Fr. Joji Thanugunda (from my church, St. James in Arlington Heights) visited Lester to give him last rites. "Can we see a smile?" he asked my brother. Tugging down his oxygen mask, Lester barely managed a smile, a courtesy he never failed to give a visitor.
The priest asked me to leave the room so he could give the last sacrament to my brother. When I returned, I noticed that Fr. Joji was emotional. He motioned for me to step outside and said, " You know, Bob, when I pray for someone like your brother, I truly feel the presence of God all around me. It's wonderful ! " He then left.
I went to my brother and asked : " If a doctor could heal you today and return you to the outside world, would you go ? "
He slowly turned his head--I think-- to say no and stared out the widow at railroad tracks and high voltage wires and, further out, a tollway .
After I had left my brother staring out that window, my hopes for him were buoyed when I read later that day this from the 20th Century Italian theologian Monsignor Romano Guardini : " Satan is… but a rebellious , fallen creature who frantically attempts to set up a kingdom of appearances [but ] is powerless against the heart that lives in humility and truth. "
The next morning I went straight to Lester's bedside and, wanting to sound as if simply asking what he had for breakfast, I said, "Do you want to become a Catholic?"
" I want to become a Catholic," he said.
" Are you positive ?"
"Yes."
I froze in the moment. Gradually, my mind caressed that "yes." Had he decided his fate sometime during the night in prayer and after combat with the devil?
All I could summon was a loved-filled " that's good, Les." I went directly home and praised God. A call came from the hospital to report that Lester's blood pressure was dangerously low and he had been returned to I.C.U. I scrambled for Lester's childhood baptismal certificate , found it , and with Mary Alice, rushed back to the hospital and gave it immediately to the hospital chaplain Fr .VanderHey.
It was 1:45 p.m. on May 27, 2011— Mary Alice, Fr. VanderHey and I stood bedside with my brother. At our request, a nurse entered and removed Lester's oxygen mask. I asked her to leave and close the door. On a nearby table I laid down the same crucifix I had previously hung in his hospital room.
Phrase by phrase ,Fr. VanderHey read my brother's solemn profession of faith . While Lester repeated it, I glanced repeatedly at the monitors beeping my brother's pulse rate and oxygen level. I worried that he might go into terminal respiratory failure before receiving all the sacraments.
Fr. VanderHey now read the Nicene Creed ; I became impatient with the pace with which Lester and the chaplain went through the sacrament of Lester becoming a Catholic Christian having received God's forgiveness of all his sins. Without the mask which had several minutes ago been giving my brother the critical oxygen he needed to live, Lester was using what little lung strength he had to blast out his sacramental words; he sounded like an exhaust popping from a truck tail pipe.
But Lester brother showed an unusually alert face. We all felt that he knew he saw this ceremony as being the most important event in his life.
After Lester's profession of faith, Fr. VanderHey asked, " can your brother swallow."
" Barely," I said, " but please do it now, father. "
" Give him half a host," Mary Alice advised. The priest did.
Conversion: a radical reorientation of the whole
life away from sin and evil, and toward God,
a definition generally accepted by several
Christian denominations
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with Fr. VanderHey, becomes a Catholic Christian !
Finally my brother sealed the sacrament with an " I do." Fr. VanderHey pressed his thumb into a small compact of holy ashes and made the sigh of the cross on Lester's forehead. He sprinkled holy water over my brother to administer the Anointing of the Sick and the Apostolic Pardon. Looking at me and then at Lester, Fr. VanderHey said: "He gets a clean slate, receives forgiveness of all his sins up to this point in his life." Lester appeared serene. I think we all did.
Tearful, my wife and I applauded and squeezed Lester's hand.
After I had left my brother staring upward that day, my last-ditch hopes for him were buoyed when I read this from 20th Century Italian theologian Monsignor Romano Guardini : " Satan is… but a rebellious , fallen creature who frantically attempts to set up a kingdom of appearances [but ] is powerless against the heart that lives in humility and truth. "
I froze in the moment. Gradually, mind caressed that "yes." Had he decided his fate sometime during the night, in the midst of combat ?
It was a delicate moment ; all I could summon was a loved-filled " that's good, Les."
The next day, Lester's blood pressure was dangerously low and he had been returned to I.C.U. I scrambled for Lester's childhood baptismal certificate , found it , and with Mary Alice, rushed back to the hospital and gave it to Fr .VanderHey , along with the good news.
That day—it was 1:45 p.m. on May 27, 2011— Mary Alice, Fr. VanderHey and I stood bedside with my brother. At our request, a nurse entered and removed Lester's oxygen mask. I asked her to leave and close the door . On a nearby table I laid down the crucifix I had quickly removed from Lester's old room.
Phrase by phrase ,Fr. VanderHey read my brother's solemn profession of faith . While Lester repeated it, I glanced repeatedly at the monitors beeping my brother's pulse rate and oxygen level. I worried that he might go into terminal respiratory failure before receiving all the sacraments. His doctor had told me that my brother had run out of rescues from these failures.
Fr. VanderHey now read the Nicene Creed ; I became impatient with the pace with which Lester and the chaplain went through it. Without the mask which had several minutes ago been giving my brother the critical oxygen he needed to live, Lester was using what little lung strength he had to blast out his words; he sounded like exhaust popping from a truck tail pipe.
But my brother showed an unusually alert face. We all felt that Lester knew that this ceremony for him was the most important event in his life.
After Lester's profession of faith, Fr. VanderHey asked me, " Can your brother swallow."
" Barely," I said, " but please do it now, father. "
" Give him half a host," Mary Alice advised. The priest did.
Finally my brother sealed the sacrament with an " I do." Fr. VanderHey pressed his thumb into a small compact of holy ashes and made the sigh of the cross on Lester's forehead. He sprinkled holy water over my brother to administer the Anointing of the Sick and the Apostolic Pardon. Looking at me and then at Lester, Fr. VanderHey said: "He gets a clean slate, receives forgiveness of all his sins up to this point in his life." Lester appeared serene. I think we all did.
Tearful, my wife and I applauded and squeezed Lester's hand.
I told Lester he had just set a new personal record of tolerating someone talking incessantly to him for more than five minutes. Lester managed a hoarse chuckle . I offered my brother a blue-colored Rosary, which had been hand-knitted by my church friend Don Knorr. My brother grasped it and, spotting the crucifix I had laid on the table, he pointed at it and smiled. Referring to the conversion of a psychotically ill person in his Intensive Care Unit, Fr. VanderHey exclaimed, "In my twenty years as chaplain, I've only seen this twice !"
In time, my brother's life would affirm what St. Paul told the Corinthians (II, 5:17: ) ,So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold new things have come.
Lester's urn was buried at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois . The epitaph on the grave marker read Once Known as the Lamb. My brother's funeral, however, was not complete. I had compromised a church doctrine by holding back half of my brother's ashes so I could scatter them on the peaceful flowing waters of a river that wound for miles through beautiful forests. Having soul-stirring memories of my late wife's ashes being spread over the Mediterranean waters she loved and having had watched my parents' ashes slowly drift off on the Wisconsin lake near where they had honeymooned, my heart and conscience impelled me to respect what I knew Mom, Dad, and Lester wanted.
We drove beyond the farming town of Oregon for several miles, following the Rock River until we saw the river bend away from the road and disappear into the forest . I drove the car off the road until it was a hundred yards or so from the river. We trudged through ankle-high mud and stopped at river's edge. The river, maybe a hundred yards wide, was high today and dark brown from recent heavy spring rains. A slow current was taking small branches and other flotsam and jetsam southward towards the Mississippi River. All was quiet, no noise from civilization.
I handed my friend Aji the urn. He walked almost to the water, reached into the urn for a handful of ashes and tossed them outward; some fell into the current, the rest was taken up by a breeze and was wafted downstream He put the urn down and reached skyward with his arms and prayed in Farsi as he had at Lester's bedside. Aji prayed for at least ten minutes. I regret never asking him for the contents of his prayer.
Karl took his turn, but before he went to the river, he pulled out a prayer composed by the Rev. Dietrich Bonheoffer and read it to us. Bonheoffer, a Lutheran and a German , was an outspoken opponent of Nazism during World War II and was hanged after being implicated in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler.
Remembering my friend Philip's remark years ago that he didn't go to church because, he said, " I just can't pray with other people near me , " I was concerned about how he might behave with us so close to him. But he stepped up to the river and tossed ashes upon it. I saw his lips move, and I was grateful for that too.
Aji, Karl, and Philip stood behind me in the muddy bank while I now held the urn. Though I prayed hard and long, I don't remember much of my prayer other than talking to my brother as if he were standing in the water facing me.
The sound of a wren's trilling turned my gaze to the trees and the puffy-cloudy sky across the river . For a long moment, I was again in that secluded, grove of oak trees at the edge of Mom and Dad's Arkansas ranch almost fifty years ago, taking deep breaths of musty wood odors and feeling delightfully intimate with all the nature surrounding me.
I didn't want to move . Looking down at the gently flowing Rock River, I felt myself being drawn into musings of a cosmic sort. I camped on a question: Was not all those molecules and atoms which had once miraculously functioned together as my brother's body, were they not now "liberated"? And if so, did not empirical science claim that most "free-floating" atoms eventually coalesce into molecules which become building blocks of organic things?
Knowing your purpose in life will:
* Give your life meaning
*Simplify your life
* Focus your life
* Increase your motivation
* Prepare you for eternity
(Rick Warren, celebrated author
who wrote "The Purpose
Driven Life". )
Yet, I never doubted for a moment that God unites the souls of his children in heaven with perfect and glorified bodies. " God is an inexhaustible source of life…we can perceive [this ] by observing both the macro-universe …and the micro-universe: cells, atoms, elementary particles ," Pope Benedict XVI was quoted in the 2010 Magnificat missal. In an interview with me, Dr. Robert W. Weise, a professor of pastoral ministry, exclaimed, " What is so amazing—and mysterious—is that God will put our molecular bodies back together again when we are raised from the dead."
My brother had bravely lived out God's prophecy to Adam: By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken.
So, how do we Christians answer the question, what is our purpose in life?
Dec. 22, 2023... I have no closing word, no climax to this autobiographic sketch, no climax. My purpose--for now--has been to write what you've been reading, and once more I thank God for each word he has sparked in me. Out of bed in the morning I pray that all day long God will give me to oomph ( I think that's Swedish for vigor) to do what easy chores I have at HarborChase, the grace to love all here, especially those whose odd language and/or disabled behavior is always difficult to lovingly respond to. I rely so much on God to keep a smile on face all day long , cheer in my voice as I interact with both residents and staff, and faith that He will somehow often keep Jesus Christ shinning on my face.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28 (NIV)
THE END
© 2014, 2023 Robert R.Schwarz
rrschwarz777@gmail.com
Soli Deo Gloria
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