The Importance of Family

It is amazing . . . how human life works. Children grow into adults. Adults meet other adults. They have children. They grow old. Their children care for them, almost switching from a son or a daughter to a father or a mother.

Today I saw the grace and strength of a daughter coaching her mother on how to think about the future. The mother's husband, and daughter's father, suffers from dementia. The mother has admitted that wondering what her husband will need in the future is something she has not yet done—something she is afraid to face.

Today I saw this daughter look into her mother's eyes with a deep concern and a gentle force. She rubbed her mother's arm with reassurance and reminder. "Someday, not long from now, he will have to leave your home and be taken care of by someone other than you." This is what her eyes, and her hands, told her mother.

It couldn't have been easy for the daughter to do this, and to feel her own sense of fear of reality. But in this moment she rescued her mother. She was the grownup to say the words out loud, to introduce the unwanted, and to pose the possibility that, in the end, this is what will be best for him. She allowed her mother to be a fragile child, to want to say "no" without even thinking first, and to reach up with fearful arms asking to be carried.

This is the beauty of being a family.