Howard's End

I almost burned the house down yesterday. Okay, that’s a little dramatic, but I did leave a pot on the stove, with the burner on high, while I went across town to watch my husband’s softball game. I had this brilliant idea that I would make chicken soup, but ended up with a petrified fowl carcass and a kitchen that still smells like some sort of bizarre voodoo ritual took place in it.

When I forget things like boiling stock pots, I become frightened about how I will be when I’m older. If I can’t remember the small stuff now (not that a house fire is small) will I even know my name then?

In my twenties, I did a brief stint as an Adult Day Care worker. Most of the residents were Alzheimer patients whose spouses needed help or a few hours of relief, so the patients would come and spend the day with us. I clearly remember one gentleman named Howard who had been a missionary before his dementia struck. Other folks who lived there told me stories of his character, his care for people, and his stellar record in the past. I, however, knew Howard to be a lecherous old man who said perverse things and exhibited no self-control. It was not his own fault for his illness had taken up the space where Howard used to be.

I can remember some of my coworkers commenting about Howard, somewhat marginalizing his faith and life as a missionary, saying things like, “When your mind goes, everyone discovers what was really inside you but you pretended wasn’t.”

I knew another Howard growing up. He was my pastor when I was a teenager. After I went away to college, I learned that he had developed Pick’s Disease and the dementia that accompanies it. When he died about six years ago, I attended his funeral and listened as his son described his final days. Even though his father no longer knew who his friends were or the places he had lived and worked or the family he had loved, Howard had continued to search the Scriptures every day, and the only two words that he still remembered and uttered were, “love” and “Jesus.” That’s it.

Sitting at the funeral, I was struck by the notion that if everything that I think, feel or imagine was laid bare for the world to see, I would surely be committed to a far more secure facility than an Adult Day Care.

I have no idea what the “Parable of the Howards” actually means, but one thing is certain, as I grow older and forget the chicken pots and perhaps my name, I want to spend my time insuring that I do remember the essentials. I want to know God so intimately, so deeply, that He is all that’s left to define me in the end. Even today, I want Him to take up the space where Wendy used to be.

Love and Jesus. That’s it.