Incomparable Acts of Kindness

Incomparable Acts of Kindness – Gifts from the Universe

      My seventeen year old daughter who is a cooking aficionado decided to give my husband and me this amazing vegetarian dinner for Easter. She spent hours on her week off from school planning, shopping and preparing a “light Mediterranean feast” for just the three of us. On Easter Sunday we were served mushroom ravioli with sage cream sauce, grilled eggplant and zucchini marinated in a rosemary garlic oil, tomato soup prepared from fresh tomatoes, Greek salad topped with carefully roasted pine nuts and feta cheese, and then the crown jewel of it all – dessert – homemade apple pie with an almond, graham cracker crust she had rolled herself, and because according to her, every thorough chef should offer two desserts for a holiday meal, she topped it off with an Amoretti chocolate cake infused with freshly grated orange peels.

     The meal was delicious, all the more satisfying because of its source. We tried to get her to hold hands to say a prayer of gratitude, but she reminded me that she is an atheist and such pomp and ceremony was entirely unnecessary. “Mom,” she reminded us when I gushed out my thanks to her for the effort, “I wanted to do it. I enjoy cooking.”

     In the meantime, my mother-in-law got sick. There is a form of dementia that attacks and kills its victims in a matter of months, besetting them with unstoppable delusions and weakening their bodily systems to such an extent that it becomes impossible for them to breathe. Our family witnessed mom’s decline from an elegant, perfectly coiffed lady in purple into someone bedridden, reliant in the end on an oxygen tank. If I am truthful, I only visited a handful of times; often she didn’t know who I was. But I could tell she wanted to pray more than anything.

     The first time it happened was before she was on hospice care, when she was still pretty much herself, just bedridden. I remembered the “Our Father” from my catholic upbringing; my mother-in-law is a staunch Methodist, but when we prayed together that first time, any prior conflict over religion dropped away. We held hands and repeated the familiar words together.

     The last time I saw her she was unable to talk, and her glorious body had shrunken into a much smaller version of herself. I stood by the bed and said “hello.” The hospice worker informed me she could tell mom was responding to my voice – and then we watched as she lifted and moved her hand toward me with tremendous effort. It seemed like the most natural thing to do was take it and repeat the familiar words of the prayer. We could tell mom knew what was happening because her eyes flickered with understanding and finally tears. It’s a short prayer – the “Our Father,” – but it made a dramatic difference in the energy in the room. Everything felt instantly lighter.

     It was an easy thing. It felt natural. In the end praying with my mother-in-law turned out to be an incomparable act of kindness, and I was the recipient. My mother-in-law is gone now but my interaction with her has taught me that small acts, acts we may not even think about too hard when they are happening, can make a permanent, tumultuous indent on the psycho sphere. When we catch ourselves in them, we should stop, feel the indelible beat of those delicate moments of grace, and embrace them.