They call. They come. They help. And I couldn’t be more grateful
Saturday afternoon I was elbows deep in my to-do list when a text vibrated my phone.
“We want to take you to lunch on your birthday,” a good friend wrote. “We can bring take-out to your place or we can go to a restaurant, whatever’s best for you and Evelyn.” The offer was like a warm shower on a chilly morning. It brightened my outlook for the whole rest of the day.
We’ll meet this friend and her husband to enjoy authentic Mexican on The Day, tomorrow. It will be the main way we’ll celebrate. In a couple of weeks when this couple and two others are all back in town, they’re planning a bigger birthday meal for me. But on my birthday tomorrow, thanks to these friends, I won’t be forced to find a nice restaurant where I’ll sit alone with Evelyn, but without much meaningful conversation, and try to feel like it’s fun. What a gift!
Showers of blessing
And it occurs to me this is only the latest in the shower of gifts that have been nurturing me regularly.
• Next week I’ll eat lunch one day with a long-ago college friend who discovered my blog last year and reached out with the offer to bring Danish and coffee for breakfast. “You said you enjoy sitting on your deck on summer mornings,” he wrote. “I’d like to come sit with you.” He has continued to ask to meet with me, once or twice most months, since then.
• Late in May, a college roommate and his wife, lifetime friends, plan to stop by from out of town with a car full of frozen casseroles and desserts to stock our freezer. This will be the second time they’ve done this.
• One of these days, a former colleague will write to plan a lunch date. We get together about every two months.
• Before the year’s out, another Alzheimer’s caregiver will do the same. He sets up a meeting at least once or twice a year.
• A former staff member at our church, with whom I had worked closely on a couple of projects, invites me for breakfast now and then. He’s an avid gardener, and we’re going to go shopping in a nursery-hopping afternoon soon.
• A friend at church promised to invite us for coffee after their current remodeling is finished.
And there are more. I’ve already mentioned the friend who volunteered to visit with Evelyn once each week, and she’s been doing that for months. When she can’t come, another lifetime friend takes her place. Last week a third gal came one afternoon, freeing me to run errands alone. Next month, a fourth friend will come stay with Evelyn so I can go hear a friend speak at a conference in town. Her husband is the guy who managed my whole basement waterproofing project.
All of these people—every single one of them—came to me; I didn’t go to them. I’m getting a little better at asking for help, but in each of these cases, I didn’t need to ask; these friends took the lead.
Incredibly grateful
I thought of them and began compiling this list as I was mulling over a comment a caregiver acquaintance made last week. She had cared for her Alzheimer’s-stricken husband for years, maybe a decade, until he died a couple weeks ago. She said friends she hadn’t seen for years came to the funeral home. Some said, “Give me a call,” she remembered, and silently wondered, Why don’t you call me?
Another caregiver confessed she’s lonely. Her husband is also a longtime patient, living now in a care facility. She said most of their couple friends have drifted away in the last several years. “I need to start over,” she admitted and added, “My daughter keeps coming up with community interest groups for me to try.”
Sad, isn’t it, to lose friends at the very time in life when you need them most? Tragic, to know you are the same person as always while those close by focus instead on your spouse’s difficult changes and their own discomfort at dealing with them.
I am incredibly grateful that so many have not reacted to us that way. We’re not alone. Our friends are seeing to it we don’t lose contact with them and the wider world.
It does me good to stop and thank God for the blessing of their faithfulness to us. Frankly, I can’t imagine our lives without them.
Photos by Comeback Images and Sophia Floerchinger at istockphotos.com