By Nancy Patrick

I have written several times this past year about how the road of my life has actually led  me down paths I had not planned to travel. On the last Sunday of January 2024, I fell in my home and fractured a vertebra—certainly not a planned event.

This happened about a year after I had gone through a spinal fusion, so the serious fracture impacted the fusion and created more problems. Because of those issues, I spent the year having multiple procedures on my spine in hopes of regaining some of my former strength, mobility, and stamina. 

Alas, my efforts to recover did not come to fruition. The down time did, however, make me realize what I do have and appreciate what I can still do. The most important lesson I have learned is the value of love in all its beauty, generosity, fragility, pain, and transcendence.

As I have spent much more time than usual inactive and at home, I had more opportunity to think about and consider sacrificial gifts of love. My husband, with whom I recently celebrated our fifty-sixth wedding anniversary, became my caregiver.

I never dreamed that he and I would trade roles within our marriage. Instead of being the on-the-go, Johnny-on-the-spot person I had always been in our marriage, I had to relinquish that role to my husband who eagerly and graciously took over.

When I told him how terrible I felt about losing my former abilities, he assured me that he had taken our marriage vows seriously. We promised love and faithfulness to each other regardless of life’s circumstances. He knows that I will do the same for him if he needs it.

Another recent and unhappy path I found myself on was the death of my younger sister. As the older sister, I had expected to die first, but that didn’t happen. My sister became very ill with many physical ailments including extreme pain from dislocated and broken bones, dehydration, malnutrition, and an intestinal disease. 

In addition to those, she had developed advanced dementia over the past year. She lived in a situation where her needs were neglected. Her adult sons took the valiant step of physically removing her from that home, admitting her to the hospital and pursuing legal help to provide her the proper care.

I recently wrote an article about my sister’s passing which revealed some of her history that had precipitated her situation. Regardless of unfortunate decisions for which she was responsible, her family never stopped loving her or trying to get her the help she needed.

 One of most complex and powerful relationships human beings encounter is the parent-child relationship. As a mother, I don’t know of anything my son could do that would change my love for him; however, most parents have experienced painful situations with their children. 

Whether they dealt with addiction, crime, divorce, career disasters, or irresponsible lifestyles, these situations rip the hearts of parents who love their children.

Judith Viorst in her poetry collection If I Were in Charge of the World, has a poem entitled “Mending” (“Mending”). 

Her words convey the anguish we feel when those we love rend our hearts: “I ought to know by now that/Broken hearts will heal again./But while I wait for the glue and tape,/The pain!/The pain!/The pain!”

One of my favorite plays to teach was Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun. The play relates a family story in which one of the characters behaves in a selfish and irresponsible manner that severely damages his family.

When Walter’s sister Beneatha rebukes him as useless and unworthy of his position as her brother, Mama teaches Beneatha a difficult truth about authentic love. 

She says to her daughter, ““Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning—because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so!” (Raisin).

Love is costly and sometimes confusing. One of my husband’s favorite movies,  A River Runs through It, stars Tom Skerritt as a Presbyterian minister whose younger son had lived a life similar to that of the Prodigal Son in scripture. 

After the son Paul dies a shameful death, his father contemplates his son’s life which had been so full of promise but ended tragically. 

In one of his final sermons, he sums up how to love those we may not understand: “Each one of us will at one time in our life look upon a loved one and ask themselves what can I do to help? We are willing to help them but what, if anything, is needed? We can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or more often than not the part we have to give is not one. And so it is those we live with and should know elude us but we can still love them. We can love completely without completely understanding” (River).

These relationships in life, whether in marriage, family, or friendship, require us to love without judgment. We cannot fix other people, nor is that our job. I Corinthians 13 teaches us the attributes of a loving and faithful follower of Christ. The passage ends with the words: “these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Nancy Patrick is a retired teacher who lives in Abilene and enjoys writing