When I was really young I loved church. I loved God. I loved reading the Bible. I was constantly begging my friends from school to come to church with me. For maybe the first ten years of my life, it really was the most important thing to me. But that passion faded for more than one reason. My quintessential coming of age mean girl experience didn’t take place at school or in Girl Scouts; it was at church. And the older I got, the more of a chore church felt like. I found myself bored and distracted during sermons. It felt like every other week some bitter old woman was scolding me about something that didn’t matter. By the time I hit my teens, it seemed like from the moment I stepped in the building I was counting down the minutes until I could leave. I usually felt lonely there, but there was one face I was always excited to see and it belonged to Hazel Maxwell.
Before my grandmother moved to North Carolina, she was one of her closest friends at church and for most of my life I thought of her as a great aunt of sorts. I remember entertaining myself around her house as a kid and running wild in her cul-de-sac. I always liked talking to her. Whether I was 5 or 15, I’d seek her out in a crowd and I couldn’t help but crack a smile when we made eye contact – even at the peak of my angst-ridden teenage years. In a sea of faces that only acknowledged me out of polite obligation or because they saw an opportunity to indulge their worst qualities behind a cover of devout Christianity, I felt immediate relief when I saw hers. She felt like home.
She spent the last eight years of her life battling Alzheimer’s, and early last December, she lost.
My mom visited her, but I never did. I’d heard about how bad things had gotten, and I couldn’t bring myself to see her in that condition. I told myself she wouldn’t remember me anyway, so what difference would it make going to see her? What good was I doing for her or myself? I didn’t want to remember her that way. And with everything going on in my life in my 20s, it was all too easy to be distracted by the moving parts and bury myself in my own problems.
I have a lot of regrets. I regret not trying harder in high school. I regret not believing in myself more, and not taking chances earlier in my life because I’d prematurely assumed defeat. I regret ending a six year best friendship the way that I did.
But I don’t know if I’ll ever regret anything more than not pushing myself to see this woman in her final years.
I could generate a million reasons and excuses for why I never did, but none of them matter.
It would’ve been uncomfortable, it would’ve been depressing, and I should’ve done it anyway.
I don’t know if this is just human nature or a feature of being young, but life has a way of wrapping you up in your problems so that they’re all you can see and all you can think about. It’s hard to remove yourself from your present circumstances, and see the bigger picture. It’s easy to lose sight of what actually matters and what’s actually right, and use your emotions to rationalize avoiding necessary action and short term discomfort.
But the older I get, the clearer it becomes that being a good person isn’t about the way you behave when life is simple, and things are going your way. It’s about who you are in the face of adversity. It’s about doing things that need to be done, even when it’s painful – and it’s about taking full responsibility for what you’ve done and what you haven’t.
And if I’m being honest with myself, I know that as busy and stressed out and distraught as I’ve been over the last 8 years over the ebbs and flows of life, I owed her so much more than what I gave her in her last years on earth. And when I look back at the things that I thought were life or death when I was 23, or 26, or 28, none of them were. But this was. And in 8 years, I didn’t want to inconvenience or upset myself for an hour to honor this woman that meant so much to me.
I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for never visiting her, and I don’t know that I should. I just hope she finally has the peace she deserves.
what do you think?