Thinking about prayer, Part Two: Four for Evelyn—and me, too!

As my friend Shawn and I talked about prayer (see last week’s post), he told me he regularly prays that Evelyn will have God’s peace, strength, hope, and joy. “I pray that for you, too, of course,” he said. “But mainly I pray that as much as Evelyn’s capacity will allow, she will experience, she will realize and feel, peace and strength and hope and joy from God.”

The more I thought about his prayers, the more I realized how remarkable they are.

Two reasons

First, they are specific. Many have prayed, “God bless Mark and Evelyn,” and indeed, I continue to realize God’s abundant blessings to us. He is answering that prayer.

But the thought invested to pray specifically is a special gift. More than one has told me, “Thanks for your blog, because it tells me how to pray for you.” What could be more wonderful?

Second, these prayers consider Evelyn’s experience as she daily copes with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. They seek to look at life from her point of view, to see the world through her eyes, rather than only ours. 

Such a starting point indicates the humility Shawn brings to his prayers, a humility I’m afraid has too often been lacking in me.

Starting with me

It’s easy to view an Alzheimer’s patient as a project or a problem. What can I do to cope with her deterioration? How should I respond to troubling or confusing behavior? How do I manage her, distract her, entertain her? When she comes to me confused or angry, how do I cope?

I, I, I!

I have all kinds of trouble or duties because of what these diseases do to her. There’s hardly a minute I’m not anticipating what’s next or watching for something to pop up I hadn’t expected. My focus is on her but always in terms of me.

I’m not beating myself up about that. If I were not on task, Evelyn would suffer.

But occasionally I remember what another friend once told me. She had experienced some measure of cognitive decline herself, which had since resolved. I think she called it brain fog, brought on, she discovered, by food and other allergies. “You can’t imagine,” she said, “how exhausting it is simply to process all the information coming at you in a day.”

Her comment reminds me of yet another friend’s experience. She married an American working in her hometown in the Dominican Republic. When he brought her back to the U.S., she was plunged into our English-speaking world, but she knew only Spanish. She told us she used to have a headache at the end of the day, just trying to understand all the strange words bombarding her moment by moment.

What must this be like?

And when I think about what life must be like for Evelyn—listening to what people are telling her but not always understanding, trying to find the bathroom in her own house, deciding where to hang a coat or just giving up and draping it on a chair, eager to help unload the dishwasher but confused about where the cups and bowls belong on the kitchen shelves—when I try to grasp how it must feel to be constantly confused and intermittently afraid, it’s almost more than I can bear.

“Are you taking me home?” she asked me in the car Saturday night after we left dinner with friends.

“Yeah, Baby, we’ll be there in just a few minutes.”

“Oh, I didn’t think you’d turn this way,” she said at one point.

“Yep, remember that big church we always pass on the way home?”

She didn’t comment. We see that sprawling Catholic church building almost every time we’re out. Did she remember? What kind of turmoil would grip me in the dark, lost in a car I wasn’t sure was taking me home?

Sometimes she balks when we’re walking and she wants to go straight at the corner where we need to turn left toward home. Sometimes she seems surprised when we get to our house just down the street.

How must it feel so regularly to be so sure and yet wrong? How would I react if several times a day I needed someone gently to say, “No, this way, not that way”? How would I respond with forks and knives in my hand only to be told, “You’ll need spoons, too,” when I’m doing my best to set the table?

Sometimes she clenches her fists and shudders in frustration when she’s trying to tell me something but can’t find the words to finish her sentence. “I HATE this!” she says. And I try not to worry about what’s trapped inside her with little possibility of escape.

Prompted to pray

It is overwhelmingly sad. Much sadder than whatever accommodations I must make, inconveniences I must suffer, embarrassments I must endure, or messes I must handle.

Shawn’s prayer prompts me to pray, too, that Evelyn will have as much peace, strength, hope, and joy as possible. And that God will use me, if not as a conduit for those blessings, at least not a hindrance to them.

If I can regularly seek those four blessings for her, I’m guessing I’ll discover them for myself as well. What could be better to pray for?

Photos by pinkomelet, Ralf Geithe and ipopba at istockphotos.com.