The hospital just called. Aunt Joan is in critical condition, with a bad infection, low blood pressure, and several other symptoms.
She is the last of my family in her generation. When she goes, I’ll be the oldest surviving member. I confess that I’m terribly afraid of being the last one left.
Please join me in prayer. O Lord our God, do unto my aunt according to your wisdom and your love, and give the rest of us the strength and the faith to trust you. In Jesus’ name, amen.
It used to be, whenever I went to my aunts’ house around Christmastime, they were watching this guy on television–Andre Rieu, with his Johann Strauss Orchestra. They loved him.
Well, now I can’t go there anymore. The very house has been torn down and replaced, no sign remaining that it ever existed, and they’ve all gone on before, leaving but a few of us on the earth. Aunt Joan is the last of us in her generation.
I will not forget. Hard for me to watch this video, but I wouldn’t want to miss it: the happy times that were shall be again, in Christ’s Kingdom. God has promised it.
Patty called me in from working on my book because she was trying to do Aunt Joan’s banking online and it wasn’t working. Twice she called the bank, and twice she got cut off. I’m power of attorney, so before we get cut off, I have to go through all this re-bop about authorizing my wife to speak to a representative. Then we get cut off and have to start over.
Third time: okay, we don’t get cut off, but for some unknown reason the user name and password don’t work anymore and have to be replaced. By way of our speaker phone, says the banker. We don’t have a speaker phone. Well, your cell phone, then. We don’t have a cell phone. And the rules say she can’t talk to my wife about this, it has to be me, and I don’t know nothin’. So Pat goes across the room to the computer while I sit here and talk on the phone, back and forth. They have to converse through me. And my allergies are dancing the lambada with my respiratory system.
Every time we have to do this, both parties want to talk at once and I can’t make out what either of them is saying. And so it goes back and forth, back and forth, for the better part of an hour.
At least it finally has a happy ending: problem solved. I can go back to trying to breathe.
Really, I do understand the need for security in these matters. We don’t want some schlemiel in Pakistan dipping into our bank accounts. But meanwhile I’ve totally forgotten what I was about to write. *Sigh*
At least I don’t see this when I look out my window…
This is shaping up to be a rather bad day.
My wife has been bitten up and down all over by we-don’t-know-what. I haven’t, which makes it all the more mysterious.
It’s raining torrents.
Aunt Joan’s finances have again suddenly turned into Hellzapoppin, necessitating, this morning, a special trip to the nursing home for me, to deliver more paperwork. This is truly the monster that will not die. Every time we think the job is finished, they come up with more demands for more information, more swishing the money around–there’s hardly any left of it!–from one bank to another.
And on the way back, it was raining so hard, half the roads were blocked and I had to find a tricky route home.
We haven’t even been to the store yet for our weekend groceries.
Oh! And I got some hate mail this morning, too! You’d think hating me would be a waste of anybody’s time, but apparently this jidrool has time to burn. He hates God, too. He uses exceedingly intemperate language, and asserts that sodomy is some kind of proof of righteousness. He’s also an atheist, which means he expends tremendous energy hating someone whom he swears does not exist.
Please don’t anybody expect too much out of me today.
I’m not going to go as far as the frustrated man in this video, but I’m sure I know how he feels.
Yesterday Firefox stopped connecting with anything, and I do mean anything. By evening it was denying me access to my own blog: displaying nothing but a page totally blank except for a WordPress logo.
So I switched over to Internet Explorer, and there discovered that “Volume control for youtube has been disabled.” All my hymns and other videos were now in pantomime. I can’t find any hymns done in semaphore, nor any readers who know semaphore. Patty fixed that problem for me.
But why had the volume control been disabled? “Well, heck, we just thought it’d be cool to mute all your videos…”
Now I’ve switched to Google. I would rather not have done so, but it’s getting so that you need a different browser for each and every operation. It’s like buying a car that will only run on gas from Amoco and cannot be driven on any street with a “G” in its name.
To me it’s beginning to look like the whole computer world is nothing but a high-tech Dogpatch, with software designed by L’il Abner. Only his might work better.
Not to mention being stuck at the Social Security office all morning and into lunchtime, trying to finalize the paperwork needed for Aunt Joan’s continued care at the nursing home. We have been told it’s all but finished now. We have been told that before, but this time maybe it’s true. This has taken, so far, six months, about 25 pounds of paper, and innumerable trips to different banks and government offices. If they’re trying to drive us crazy, they’re doing a mighty good job of it.
Can I please get back to work on my book sometime?
Normal service will be resumed this afternoon. I had to sit around the Social Security office all morning to get more paperwork done for Aunt Joan.
I will unwind with a cigar and then get to work.
Aunt Joan’s life savings have just about run out. And because her care in the nursing home costs more than the whole family put together could ever pay, she has to go on Medicaid.
So now we wander in a paper labyrinth, part maze, part hall of mirrors, back and forth, up and down, around and around, and God only knows if we’ll ever come out the right door. Last week it was Joan’s birth certificate. Now it’s her bank statements, month by month, going back five years. Medicaid demands them. We have to provide them. And one of the banks seems intent on making this as difficult as possible.
My wife, a high-class bookkeeper all her working life, has been trying to manage this. Yesterday I spent all morning at a couple of different banks, finally coming home under the blissful illusion that we’d actually accomplished something. Nope. Just caused another avalanche of paper to fall on our heads.
I want to know how a younger person, who is not a widely experienced bookkeeper and who has to report to work every day, could ever possibly hope to handle this. Take a year off work? Or try to do all this when he gets home from work? Oops–everybody you’d need to talk to is gone for the day. Maybe magic. Yeah, magic! That might work.
I have to stop writing about this now. My head is pounding.
When I go to visit Aunt Joan at the nursing home, I usually visit with a couple of the other residents. Like, why not, as long as I’m there? They might appreciate a visit.
So I was talking today with the woman in the room across the hall from Joan, telling her about Joan’s travels all over the world, back in the day. Gloria wanted to know if Joan ever visited Barbados, because that’s where she was born and raised. We got to talking about Barbados, and Gloria asked me how old I was. It turned out she’s only one year older than I am.
One year. That’s not much. And yet she’s in the nursing home and I’m still playing basketball, when I get the chance. What a world of difference is packed into that one year!
I think the lesson God wants me to take to heart is this: to take no blessings for granted, but to treasure them and be thankful for them while we have them. Once again I found myself thinking, “Well, my aunts worked diligently and were able to do the things they most wished to do. They lived solid Christian lives and were a blessing to everyone who knew them.” And which of us can say the same?
My mother’s unmarried sisters, Gertie, Millie, and Joan, lived in the same house all their lives, with their mother and father, and worked at the same jobs all their lives. You might think that was boring, but you’d be wrong: it freed them up to do what they really, really wanted to do.
What they did was travel. Not like travel is now, with everybody doing it, jet planes, computers, etc. We’re talking the 1950s and 60s, with propeller-driven airliners and luxury ocean liners. It was glamorous, back then. And very few people did it. But my aunts did it practically every year, usually in the summer, and there wasn’t much of the globe they didn’t cover.
They started out seeing America, places like Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon, then Canada and Alaska, back when Alaska was an exotic destination. Before it was a state. By the time they were done, they’d been to Central America, Egypt (where Millie had a bout of claustrophobia inside the Great Pyramid–imagine that!), Norway, Iceland, England, Spain, Italy, East Africa (lunch at The Black Cat Cafe in Uganda: not for the faint-hearted), South America, and Australia (where Gertie declined to hold the koala). They always brought back slides, boxes and boxes full of slides, and souvenirs. And they were much in demand as speakers at their churches. I think the only places that they didn’t go to were places that you weren’t allowed to go to, back then, like Russia or China.
I can’t stress this enough: back then, nobody was traveling like that–nobody but professional travel writers. And these three little maiden ladies from a small town in New Jersey. They could’ve easily hosted a TV show. But they liked their lives the way they were–stable, peaceful, and Christian… and seasoned with a hearty tablespoon of worldwide travel. A lot of us would have called that “adventure.” But for my aunts, it was just the way they liked to live.
This trophy’s for my wife, who has found Aunt Joan’s birth certificate, tucked away among the family papers where we missed it the first time. Heck, she even found Joan’s mother’s birth certificate, vintage 1886.
So take that, you nasty, surly, obstructive little paper-pusher in the Plainfield Bureau of Vital Statistics! Fooey, in your general direction! We’ve got it anyway, and now we can proceed with arranging Joan’s continued care.
Thank you, Lord!