Last Straw
Last Straw
“My being
thirsts for God, the living God…
Here deep calls to deep…” excerpts from Psalm 42: 3, 8
My
Great Uncle just turned 92 last week! He has been afflicted with dementia for
around 20 years now. But, before dementia set in and he retired, he had been an
electronics & sonar teacher for the Navy at Great Lakes during WWII, a
graduate student in physics at UCLA, a post-doctorate fellow in Germany, a
research scientist at Oakridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, a University
of Wisconsin physics professor, and small business owner, specializing in
research about superconductivity. Very, very, very, very, very smart guy.
When
I was growing up, my Great Aunt and Great Uncle lived within a mile of our home,
but we were all so busy. Me, and my family were busy with the life of
schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and my parents’ work; they with
university work and social demands. We got together for a few occasions - Halloween
visits, Easter brunches, a Thanksgiving dinner here, a football game there. I
didn’t really get to know him well until after he retired, and after I finished
college.
As
blessings would have it, my Great Aunt and Uncle retired to San Diego to nice
retirement community there where they could enjoy the sea, social life,
historic-cultural places, and restaurants they had loved to visit when they
escaped snow and ice in Wisconsin for a few weeks each winter during my Uncle’s
days as a professor. They had been living there in retirement, just under a
decade, when life began to reunite us. To cut a very long story extremely
short, my Great Aunt died in 2001, and in 2002, by providence via the Navy,
Steve and I (fresh out of school with MD and OT degrees) moved to San Diego.
This was amazing good fortune, because in my training, I had learned a good
amount about therapeutic care for people with dementia. It seemed God-given, because the Navy
tends to put people wherever it wills, and we could just as easily have been sent
clear across the States to Jacksonville, Florida for Steve’s internship year.
Instead, we lived in San Diego for six years. Kept there, even through 2 more
changes in military orders!
This
providential reunion, gave us some wonderful time to get to know each other
much better, even within the limits of his short-term memory problems. We enjoyed
many warm, repetitive, and loving conversations over lunches, and cups of
coffee. But, his cups of coffee always puzzled me. He always requested a straw
to drink his coffee from. I thought that perhaps this was part of the dementia,
that he was just a touch crazy and forgot that they were just for stirring. I’d
never drink coffee from the stirring straw. That’s why we call it the “stirring”
straw - isn’t it?! Seemed like the coffee on the bottom would be scalding.
It
wasn’t until just this last autumn when, one unremarkable Saturday, I got a cup
of coffee, remembered my Great Uncle’s straw fetish, and I decided to try it
for myself. In a moment after my first sip, I started tearing up, realizing
what a ding-dong I had been for
thinking he was crazy. Of course! I
realized. He may have dementia, but by his own significant years of training in
physics, and life, he knew that hot air and hot liquids always rise to the top! He was using wisdom and the straw
to drink the cooler coffee at the bottom of the cup!
