Straight Paths- The Delicate Balance

The Delicate Balance

Loren Hardin

The Ashland Beacon 

             This is part one of a series about Kate who enrolled in outpatient hospice services with end-stage congestive heart failure. Kate is a strong-willed ninety-one-year-old widow who lives with her daughter, Rose, and son-in-law, Bub. Kate was born in West Virginia. She married at seventeen and migrated to southern Ohio where she has lived most of her life. 

             As a young girl Kate was a crack shot with a 22 riffle. Kate recounted: “When I was around ten years old our neighbor sent his son over to our house to buy a couple chickens. I asked him if he wanted them today or for later, and he told me his father would like them for supper that night. I told him I already let them out and couldn’t get them back until later, so I would have to go up in the woods and shoot them. We always let our chickens run around in the woods like that because they would get as big as turkeys. So, I went up to the woods where they were and whistled. They stuck their heads up to look around and their heads made good targets. A few days later the old man next door told me, ‘If you can shoot like that, I know I’m not going to mess around up there’. I told him that he didn’t have any business messing around our house anyway.” 

            Kate may be a little older, but she is as feisty as ever. There was a preexisting bone of contention between Kate and Rose when I made my first visit. We were standing at the foot of Kate’s bed when Rose pleaded, “Loren, will you tell mom not to get out of bed and try to walk to the bathroom by herself?” I replied, “Rose, I don’t think I can do that. Your mom is of sound mind, and I respect her right to make her own decisions.” Kate interjected, “Rose and Bub’s room is all the way on the other side of the house, and I don’t want to disturb them in the middle of the night every time I need to go to the bathroom. So, what I do is pray and ask God if it’s okay if I get up by myself. If He says it’s okay, then I get up.” How can anyway argue against that?

            It was obvious that Rose was surprised and disappointed by my response, therefore I explained: “Rose, “Several years ago my father-in-law, Dave, suffered a series of five strokes, and like your mom, he would try to walk without help. Consequently, we were continually picking him up off the floor. One day my mother-in-law called me for help, and when I arrived, I found Dave curled up on his side on the living room floor. I looked down at Dave and proceeded to scold him, I told him, ‘Dave, how many times have we told you not to try to walk by yourself!’ I would have never dared to talk to my father-in-law like that when he was healthy, when he was at himself.  I will never forget Dave’s defeated and resigned response, ‘Okay, I’ll never walk again.’  I felt terrible, about an inch tall. That was the day that I realized that there are some things worse than a broken bone, and that’s a broken spirit. So, I apologized to Dave and told him that no matter how many times he falls that I would be there to pick him up.”

            Rose, Kate, and I spent the remainder of the visit talking about how caregiving involves a “delicate balance”, a balance between providing support while fostering personal growth and independence.  Since then, I’ve come to realize the importance of a “delicate balance”, not just in caregiving, but in all our affairs. Allow me to illustrate with a parable: “One day Sid attached himself to a leaf and started spinning a cocoon around himself. You might have thought that there was nothing happening inside, but a transformation was taking place. After many days Sid started struggling to break free. No matter how well meaning, if you tried to help Sid break free by pulling on his wings you risked maiming Sid for life.”

             Oswald Chambers (1874- - 1917), Scottish Baptist evangelist and teacher wrote: “One of our severest lessons comes from the stubborn refusal to see that we must not interfere in other people’s lives…Are we playing the spiritual amateur providence in other lives? Are we so noisy in our instructions of others that God cannot get anywhere near them … When we put our sympathy in the way, the soul will one day say, ‘That one was a thief, he stole my affections from Jesus, and I lost my vision of Him…Are we detached enough from our own spiritual hysterics to wait on God? To wait on God is not to sit with folded hands, but to learn to do what we are told.” (My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers). 

            Loren Hardin worked as a social worker at SOMC Hospice for twenty-nine years. He can be reached at lorenhardin53@gmail.com or 740.357.6091. You can purchase a copy of his book, “Straight Paths: Insights for living from those who have finished the course”, at Amazon.