Watching the Strongest One in the Family Get Small

For most of a lifetime she was the one who decided things.

Not officially. Officially somebody else was in charge, and everybody would have said so out loud, and the arrangement was never discussed. But if you wanted a thing to happen in that family, you went to her, and if she was against it, it did not happen, and nobody could ever point to the moment it was stopped.

She ran seven households from a kitchen. She knew every birthday and every debt and every quarrel and exactly which of them could be used.

And now she needs a hand to get from the chair to the door.

There is no category for what that does to a person watching it. It is not grief, because she is here. It is not relief, though there is a shameful thread of that in it somewhere for some people, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. It is something else, and it has no name in either of my languages.

Proverbs has one instruction about this exact moment, and it is phrased as a negative, which tells you what the actual danger is.

The instruction is negative, and that is the tell

Here is the verse.

Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old. (Proverbs 23:22, King James Version)

Despise not. Not: love her more. Not: be patient. The instruction is a prohibition, and a prohibition is only written where a temptation actually exists.

Which means Scripture is telling us something uncomfortable: that when a formidable person becomes frail, the natural drift of the people around them is downward, and it happens without anybody deciding to.

Despising here is not sneering. Almost nobody in a family sneers. It is much quieter than that. It is talking about her in front of her. It is deciding for her because deciding with her takes forty minutes. It is the shift from asking her to managing her, and it can be complete inside about eighteen months with everybody involved acting from love.

You are being warned about a drift rather than accused of a cruelty. Proverbs 23:22 names it as a thing to be avoided rather than as a thing already done, and it is the Holy Spirit, John 16:8, who reproves gently and from inside rather than by anybody's audit.

The first half of the verse is the antidote

People quote the second half and skip the first, and the first is the actual instruction.

Hearken unto thy father that begat thee.

Hearken means listen, and it is an active verb. It is not a feeling about somebody, it is a thing you do with forty minutes and a chair.

And that is the practical answer to the drift, because the drift begins precisely where the listening stops. The moment a person becomes somebody to be handled rather than somebody to be heard, everything else follows automatically, and no amount of dutiful care puts it back.

I would say something specific to the people this article is for. There is information in that old woman that will be gone in a few years, and nobody in your family has written any of it down, and there is a window and it is not long.

You are able to keep somebody heard while their body is going. Proverbs 23:22 puts hearkening first as the guard against the despising, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, that the longsuffering a slow answer takes is produced.

God says something about Himself and gray hair

There is a verse where God ties His own identity to this exact stage of life.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4)

Even to hoar hairs. Gray hair, named explicitly, as the far edge of a life, and God's claim about Himself extends all the way out to it and past it.

And He piles up the verbs: made, bear, carry, deliver. He does not describe Himself as visiting the old. He describes Himself as the one carrying them, in the present tense, at the moment the family is doing the visible carrying.

So the woman being helped across the room is not, at that instant, in a diminished relationship with God. Her standing with Him is exactly what it was when she ran seven households, and nothing about the chair has moved it.

You are watching somebody God has claimed all the way to the far end. Isaiah 46:4 says even to hoar hairs will I carry you, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:16, that the witness of belonging is borne rather than by anybody's capacity.

There is a prayer in the Psalms for this fear

The old ones in a family rarely say what they are afraid of, and one of them wrote it down in the book so nobody would have to.

Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth. (Psalm 71:9)

That is the fear, stated plainly. Not death. Being cast off. Being still here and quietly moved to the edge of the room.

And it is worth knowing that this fear exists in her, because it explains a great deal of behavior that gets read as difficulty. A person who is frightened of becoming irrelevant will often do the exact thing that makes them harder to be around, and the family reads the behavior and never sees the fear.

If it helps, and I say this as somebody who was slow to see it: some of what looks like control in an old person is fear of disappearing, and it is answerable, and the answer is not more compliance. The answer is being asked something.

You are able to answer a fear that nobody in the room has named out loud. Psalm 71:9 puts that prayer in the book so the fear would be visible, and it is the Spirit who searches all things, 1 Corinthians 2:10, rather than a family guessing at what is happening in somebody.

Paul describes two directions at once

There is a sentence in Corinthians that describes exactly what a person is watching, and it refuses to describe only half of it.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16)

Though our outward man perish. He does not soften it. The body is going and Paul says so without a euphemism, which is more honest than most of what gets said in a room like that.

Yet the inward man is renewed day by day. Two directions, simultaneously, in one person. One line going down that everybody can see and one going up that nobody can.

That is the thing to hold while watching somebody get small. What is visible is genuinely happening and it is genuinely a loss. And it is not the only thing happening, and the other thing is described as happening day by day, which is to say it is happening today, in that chair, while she waits for somebody to help her up.

You are looking at only one of two lines, and Scripture names the other one. 2 Corinthians 4:16 puts both in one sentence, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that the inner man is strengthened, which is the renewal being described.