The Healing Hope Newsletter
(formerly People Speak)
July 2009
http://www.MarionDuckworthMinistries.com
Sophie* lived in a less-than-modern frame nursing home with outside fire escapes and small trailers to expand the space. A gray-haired wisp of a woman, the day I first visited her, she was seated in a chair bent over the sock she was mending.
“I live in a house around the corner from you,’ I told her. She peered at me from under a green eyeshade and motioned me to pull up a straight-backed chair. I took in the rest of the room. A crossword puzzle book, a nearly empty jar of jelly, blunt-end scissors, a jar of instant coffee.
I returned the next week and the weeks after that. Soon she was answering questions I didn’t ask. ‘I fell after an operation and have had to use this ever since.” She pointed to her walker.
“I was born with one eye, and the artificial one doesn’t fit right. That’s why I keep one lens of my glasses taped.”
“I fall sometimes because I have epilepsy.”
This near octogenarian rarely left the facility. She had few visitors and no family except a brother. “He lives too far away to come often.”There wasn’t a hint of a whine in her voice.
Age and illness hadn’t doused my friend’s fire. Her voice crackled when she told me what she thought about certain politicians and their lack of concern for the needy.
On one visit I found her lying under the covers, her spark doused. Slowly she opened her eyes. I held out the Dixie Cup of ice cream I’d brought. She threw back her covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!”
Another week when I came armed with a newspaper and ice cream, the director told me she’d been taken to the hospital. I went immediately, sat by her bedside, and sang “Jesus Loves Me.” Then I prayed. She opened her eyes long enough to let me know she’d heard.
I was making tiny birthday cakes for residents of the nursing home when the phone rang. It was her brother.
“Sophie died today.”
I ordered a chrysanthemum plant to be wired to the funeral. But I was glad I’d brought her a bunch of daffodils from my yard just weeks before.
Sophie’s husband was dead, she had almost no family, few friends, and no children. She could have wallowed in self pity because she felt abandoned. Still, she was grateful. She had a tiny room, three meals a day, a black-and-white TV, a jar of jam. And her very own window to the world outside.
This story is taken from Naked on God’s Doorstep (Marion Duckworth; Multnomah Press 2007)
*Sophie is a pseudonym
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