Eight letters: the space between their world and mine

Recognizing that the space between her world and the one she is slowly but surely entering is drawing closer, Pat Summitt, who has won more basketball games than anyone in NCAA history, stepped down as coach of the Tennessee Lady Vols last week. Summitt was diagnosed with early onset dementia last year, at the age of 58.

Early onset dementia attacks people younger than 65. Many are in their 40s and 50s, and some even in their 30s.

Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia, affects millions. The statistics are staggering: According to the Alzheimer’s Association, in 2011, 5.4 million Americans were living with Alzheimer’s; 15,000,000 caregivers provide 17 billion hours of unpaid care at home; Alzheimer’s costs the nation $200 billion annually, and someone develops the disease every 68 seconds.

If all the Alzheimer’s patients were placed in one state, it would be the 5^th largest in our nation.

It is predicted that if a cure for dementia is not found by 2050, 16 million Americans will have some form of the disease, with Alzheimer’s being the most prevalent.

Life is by no means over with a dementia diagnosis. Like any good coach, Pat Summitt has a strategy to stay healthy as she faces Alzheimer’s. And her son, Tyler, also a basketball coach, reminds us that we can learn from those with Alzheimer’s. “Despite (it), she has stuck to her principles and stayed strong in her faith. Her confidence to be open about this disease has taught me the importance of honesty,” he said in an interview with Carol Steinberg of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America.

Tyler is right: Victims of this disease still have much to teach us. Entering their world on a fairly regular basis, I learn from them.

 And every time I look into their eyes, I’m reminded that the space between their world and mine is only the length of that eight letter word: dementia.

One, whose blank stare appears fixated on the other side of the room, no longer recognizes me.

Only several years ago he was in the early days of retirement. I remember him then, still robust, vigorous, and active. And today, I miss that wry, almost cocky smile of his.

“We love you,” I remind him.

“You’re a good man,” he says in a monotone voice with no facial expression. I wonder if his answer is a standard response he learned years ago, like “hello,” “good-bye,” “how do you do?”

Stepping into the world of another, I ask this former leader in our church, “How are you doing?”  

Without fail he answers the same: “Can’t complain.”

“Looks like you just finished eating. What did you have?”

Like a little boy who has been asked a question above his years of comprehension, he doesn’t attempt to formulate a response but innocently looks to his wife for the answer.

Down the hall, I step into the world of another whose life changed years ago.

Walking her to the dining hall, she surprises me. Instead of the same question she normally repeats over and over, “Where am I?” this time she asks instead, “Who put me here?”

Not sure of the answer and not wanting to agitate her with a guess, I appeal to the highest source possible: “The Lord,” I instantly tell her, masking my hesitation.

“The Lord,” she says, repeating it back to me, seemingly satisfied with my response, at least for another evaporating moment in her life, and then slowly, deliberately she declares, “Yes,” like a math student who has just discovered the answer to an algebraic equation that became suddenly obvious.

Walking out of their world, I get in my car, and as I turn the ignition, I ponder how the space between their world and mine is encompassed by the same love of the One who has us both in his caring hands.

In 10 Gospel Promises for Later Life, Dr. Jane Marie Thibault tells about a nurse’s answer to a dementia patient’s question, “Honey, what’s my name?”

After the nurse told her, the patient said, “Oh, that’s right! Half the time I don’t even know who I am!” Then, pointing to a cross on the wall, she said confidently, “But he does, and that’s all that counts!”

Indeed it is, no matter which side of that space you are living in.

Why bad boys are bad

Last week was a bad week for bad boys. First, 51 year old Bobby Petrino, at the height of his career, got himself fired as the University of Arkansas football coach for allegedly trying to deceive the University’s Athletic Director about the coach’s relationship with the 25 year old football employee and former volleyball player, Jessica Dorrell. Then 11 Secret Service agents were placed on administrative leave for allegedly being involved with prostitutes in Cartagena, Columbia, while preparing for President Obama’s visit. Petrino, the father of four, was one of the top coaches in college football. It took years of successful steps before he could stand in that exclusive realm. And those secret service agents worked long and hard to gain their honored positions in the Secret Service, an elite group whose job it is to protect the president and other high ranking officials. Now, the University of Arkansas is embarrassed by Petrino’s actions, just as the Secret Service is by those agents. Why would these men take such a risk? There’s a scene in the movie, The Help, where concerned friends are trying to set up Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) with a man. The two are making conversation at a restaurant, waiting for their double-date partners to arrive, and already, Skeeter’s date is half-drunk and making rude comments. Skeeter, the unsouthern southern girl, wastes no time in telling him what she thinks about him. As she stands up to walk away, she asks, “I’m sorry, but were you dropped on your head as an infant?” Maybe someone should ask Petrino and the Secret Service agents the same question. More pointedly, why do men do such incredibly stupid things? After all, Petrino and the 11 men in the Secret Service are only the last in a long line of men who have done stupid things: Tiger Woods, Rick Pitino, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John Edwards are only a starter list for a huge catalog of names that stretches across history. It can be traced all the way back to the original stupid guy: Adam. From the time Adam took the forbidden fruit from Eve, men have been trying to please women. The problem is, men seem to get confused about which woman to please. Thus, tempted by the fruit of another, men mistakenly imagine the new fruit is different and therefore better than what they already have. And one bad decision leads to another. But, where Adam started it, Jesus stopped it, or at least he gave us reason to hope we could. And he understood that we’ve all done things we’ve later regretted. He stood up for one who was about to be stoned to death for getting involved in one of those stupid things. Two people were caught in the very act of adultery; it was only the woman who was dragged before the moral majority. That’s when Jesus intervened: “Let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone” (John 8:7). One by one those arrogant men lowered their heads, dropped their stones, and walked away. The only one without sin that day turned to the woman and refused to condemn her. Then he left her with a command: “Go and sin no more,” he admonished. That’s the seemingly impossible challenge: stop doing stupid things. But, he who issued the command gives us himself, and in him, we discover the possibility of fulfilling it. That should give hope to all of us: bad boys and bad girls.

When travelers find each other

My wife and I were the only customers in the souvenir and gift shop, lone shoppers during an off-season in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The lady at the cash register was kind but guarded, like the person checking your ID at airport security. But something about this lady intrigued me: Was she shy or resentful? Uncaring or prudent? Calloused or bruised?

Directing me to the next aisle, she snapped, staccato style, “Sweatshirts and hoodies over there; caps, next aisle.” Her accent, which I guessed to be Eastern European, was heavy.

Rummaging through the sweatshirts, I found one I liked. “How do you think this one fits?” I asked, trying to draw her into a conversation.

“Da large, better. Medium, too small,” she glowered at me over her reading glasses.

Feeling like a grade school student who had asked a question with an obvious answer yet still unconvinced of it, I was afraid to state my disagreement with her size assessment.

“Where are you from?” I cautiously queried, realizing the question was risky: I feared she would ignore me, refusing to reveal that much about herself, ceasing any possibility for further conversation.

“Europe,” was her blunt response.

I plowed on: “Eastern Europe?”

“Greece.”

“Oh, a beautiful country,” I said, smiling. “I visited there many years ago. I loved all the historical sites in Athens--- the Acropolis, the Pantheon.”

My tourist resume drew no response. But I wasn’t ready to give up, not yet.

“I studied Classical Greek in college. In fact, I majored in it.”

Straight faced, she continued staring right through me as if I weren’t there.

Unable to break the conversation code, I finally turned and walked away.

Three steps down the aisle, I turned back around.

“Someday I would like to visit the monastery at Mt. Athos,” I blurted.

It was like I had said the magic word that opened a secret door; she now invited me in for a visit. Grinning, she looked directly at me: “Holy men of God are there.”

Encouraged, I asked, “Are you Eastern Orthodox?”

“Ahh, yes, Eastern Orthodox,” she nodded, as if I had mentioned a close personal friend.

“I often pray using the comboschini of the Orthodox faith,” I continued, pulling my prayer rope from my pocket.

Smiling like her long awaited dinner guest had finally arrived to enjoy her gyros and baklava, she showed me her prayer rope and then turning around, opened a drawer and pulled out a picture album.

“You look,” she commanded, opening the book for me: “Pictures of my home.”

She was beaming now, pointing out photograph after photograph of her church, her town, its beaches, the mountains, the grandeur of her homeland.

I could imagine her carefully lifting the photo album from the drawer when no one was in the store and gazing into the pictures, slowly inhaling the fresh air of Greece.

“You miss your home?”

The tears in her eyes were her answer.

There is a common thread among us, connecting us to places so dissimilar and so alike. Sometimes, like travelers on the same road, we meet at the intersection of different faiths, and in their diverse expressions we find a commonality reminding us of familiar beginnings, a spiritual likeness that stays with us on the road to new discoveries.

Other times, we bump into each other on the entrance ramp of a shared place, a common culture, even though on that traveled, yellow bricked road, it’s obvious we’re no longer in Kansas anymore, for had we stayed where we were, never venturing to ask---Where? Who?--- we wouldn’t have noticed the other travelers. We’re too familiar with them in Kansas.

Sometimes it’s a prayer rope, or a holy book, or a religious symbol that jars our unconscious longings for traveling companions whose presence carries the scent of our spiritual origins and whose eyes squint toward our ultimate destination. And having waved bye as we travel on, we realize we have just met old friends for the first time.

Again.

But you have to look for them, or you’ll swish by them---clerks at cash registers, waiters at restaurants, seat mates on airplanes---and they’ll miss you, too, as casually as you pass strangers on opposite escalators.

And in those moments when we do pause to look, when we dare to inquire, we sometimes, even if only rarely, find ourselves sharing photographs of our mutual pilgrimage.

And along the long and winding road, those encounters can soothe the loneliness of the lonely, the bitterness of the bitter, the weariness of the weary.

Against her earlier recommendation, I bought the medium, not the large sweatshirt.

But my new friend didn’t seem to notice.

She was too busy showing me her life journey in photographs.


Contact David B. Whitlock, Ph.D., at drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com or visit his website, www.Davidbwhitlock.com

“Correcting our failure to communicate this Easter”

George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Communication is an imperfect science, to say the least.

I picked up the phone just the other day and thought I correctly read the caller ID: “Lebanon Elementary School,” the school where my wife works. So naturally, I assumed it was her.

But that’s not what it said. And it wasn’t her.

I didn’t have my reading glasses on, and though I held the phone at arm’s length and squinted, I still missed the name.

But, convinced it was Lori, I blurted, “Hey, Babe, why didn’t you call me on my cell, like you always do?”

I could feel tension on the other line, then a timid, “Could I speak with Lori?”

Oops. It definitely wasn’t Lori.

Then I wrongly assumed it was another teacher: “Oh, I’m sorry,” I chuckled, a bit chagrined at the thought of how I had referred to the caller as “Babe.”

I tried to recover: “You want to speak with Lori? But Lori’s with you isn’t she?”

“No, sir, Lori isn’t with me.”

“Then where is she?” I asked with confusion oozing from my voice.

Now, with the faintest hint of irritation, “Sir, I’m calling to confirm her appointment tomorrow.”

Ahh, I finally got it, even without my reading glasses.

I wished I hadn’t answered the phone and just let the voice mail get it. I imagined the receptionist hanging up the phone, twirling her seat around, and giggling to her co-workers. The whole thing had probably been recorded for quality control.

“Hey, come on over here and listen to this guy,” I could hear her saying as she bent over in her chair laughing. The whole office is now primed for a funny one before they even hear my voice. I could see them all gathered around the recorder, laughing hysterically till their sides ache.

“We needed that,” one chortles.

“Talk about a confused hubby,” says another.

They shake their heads in pity at me as they return to work.

Having located my reading glasses, I try and dismiss this scene by calling my 87 year-old father. Sharing my embarrassing moment with him will be cathartic, I think. But first I ask him how he’s doing.

“Ok, now,” he says, “but yesterday we saw the worst movie ever.” (Dad and a group of men at his retirement center go to a movie once a week.) “Foul language, horrible. I don’t know why people think they have to talk like that. And this couple lived together just to have sex. Terrible.”

“Well, what was the name of the movie?”

“I don’t even know.”

“You didn’t know the name of the movie? Why did you see it?”

“Didn’t intend to. We misread the marquee and went in the wrong theatre!”

I started laughing at the thought of these perplexed men, well into their 80s, sitting in the wrong theater, grimacing at each other, trying to figure out what’s going on.

Then, I caught myself. “What am I laughing about? I haven’t told him my story.”

As the saying goes, “The acorn didn’t fall far from the tree.”

And if you think about it, it didn’t fall far from you either.

We’re all communicatively impaired. The Tree of Communication Confusion, planted in the Garden of Eden, blossomed when our first ancestors ignored God and misread Satan. Then the confusion went viral at the Tower of Babel. Though down the centuries, through word and prophesy, God kept trying to grab humankind’s attention, most just didn’t get it.

As a last resort that was always in the works, God himself came in the flesh to talk like one of us in our language.

“Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand” (Mark 4:9), Jesus said. But even after the resurrection of Christ, it was difficult to read the message, at least at first sight: “It was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him” (John 20:14), John noted of a disoriented Mary Magdalene.

But it’s a true and wonderful story, even though we still struggle to understand, and this week Christians celebrate it---the Passion of Christ, culminating in his death and resurrection.

So, put your reading glasses on and find the right theater. You don’t want to miss this one.