Grace Period at the End of the Road

My burning question since my mom was moved to a nursing home last year has been “why does the end of life have to be so hard?” Haven’t most people been through enough challenges by that stage in their life to earn an easy ticket home? (I have a bone to pick with God on this one…) Some people say it’s karma that determines how the end of life will be. And, of course, Francis says it’s because they ate dead animals all of their lives. My thought is that it doesn’t matter… by that time in a person’s life, it’s a moot point. It’s done. And I think everyone, no matter what kind of life they’ve led deserves a final grace period at the end. Maybe some people have earned a longer grace period from the suffering. I can agree with that. And I realize that some of this comes with our society, a society in which the accepted solution for the elderly is a nursing home. I know I’m not equipped to handle my mom’s needs. But I’m on a mission to do my part in making it better.

A few weeks ago in my Monday night energy healing class with Francis, he mentioned that going to a nursing home was good practice for the energy healing we’re learning, a good way to learn how different diseases feel energetically. And I thought, since I spend most weekends at my Mom’s nursing home, what a great opportunity for me to practice. But then later, as I was thinking about it, I realized that it’s not about the practice, it’s about helping these people. Every weekend when I walk through the nursing home, I see these people sitting around the nurse’s station, slumped in the wheelchairs they’re tied into, sad, lonely, confused, afraid, sick. It’ll break your heart…that is, until you desensitize yourself to it.

So, the next weekend when I went to the nursing home, I was actually excited to be there, excited that maybe I could make a difference. Until that point, I had kept what’s going on with my mom very compartmentalized in my head. With life’s challenges right now, if I let the emotional stress of her situation enter into it, it would put me over the edge of being overwhelmed. So I kept it in a neat little place in my head and only pulled it out on the weekends, when I would compartmentalize for those 2 days, the rest of my life.

But that weekend was different. I focused on opening my heart as I walked through the nursing home, sending out love and healing energy everywhere I went. And it was amazing. I’ve thought for a while that, in my mom’s current state, that the veil between dimensions has thinned, that she really is seeing the people, the children, that she claims to see. But as I went to get my mom water, or went back and forth to my car, I would send out love and healing energy, and the way the folks responded made me think that, indeed, the veil is thinner and they are more sensitive to the energy I was sending. At one point I went to get my mom a coke and walked down the hallway where they were all lined up in their wheelchairs to go into the dining hall and they all looked so sad and sick and lonely. I focused on sending healing energy, light and love. When I came back around the corner from the coke machine, and walked toward them, they all lit up and smiled at me. The difference was amazing, and it took so little to make that difference. And the best was yet to come.

I had decided the best way to try to get the ‘powers that be’ at the nursing home to let me do energy work on the residents was to start with the staff. I guess energy work in Tomball, Texas is not very common. A couple of people on duty were vaguely familiar with reiki after seeing it on the Discovery channel. When I explained it and offered to demonstrate, one person immediately wanted me to work on her sore ankle. So we went to the TV room and I started working on her ankle. There’s this one little old lady with piercing blue eyes that is too infirmed to communicate well, but she pads around in her wheelchair, always lonely, always sad. She came wheeling up to us and asked what we were doing. I told her that putting my hands on Ann’s ankle would make it feel better. So she padded up a little closer to us and reached out her frail little hand and put it on Ann’s leg to help it feel better. She still wanted to help, even in her condition.

I realized a couple of weeks ago, after my mom hurt herself during a bathroom transfer, that she is never going to get out of bed again. And since my family refuses to acknowledge the work I do, there’s nothing I can do to help her, except from a distance. But I guess that’s better than nothing.

So, for these folks that are on their way out, maybe it’s up to us to create the final grace period at the end of their road. And I’m on a mission to make that happen.