Every once in a while, a piece of writing strikes me like lightning illuminating a dark landscape.
In her essay, “Sunlight Through Stained Glass,” Monica Seeley recounts the descent of her older sister into the dungeons of Alzheimer’s, yet that brief synopsis hides the lightning of her prose.
While still in elementary school, Seeley lost both her parents within three years. Her sister, 20 years older and with a family of her own, took Seeley in and raised her until college.
“It wasn’t until my own children were on the cusp of adulthood that I appreciated how much of my happy life and strong faith I owed to my sister, and knew how her thoughts and prayers had followed me as I built that life half a continent away,” Seeley writes.
This was a woman led by faith who counted her blessings and brought joy to all around her. Before her memory loss became acute, Seeley tells us, they spoke almost daily by phone, and her sister would talk of her blessings and “would recite the most important: her marriage, her twelve children, their faithful lives and happy families, and her sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine (the number was always increasing) grandchildren.”
Seeley then writes:
She once told us kids that a family’s job was to teach all its members how to love. Her philosophy was the more you love, the more love you have to give. She had lived by that belief, and by another: ‘Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.’ Joy was the measure she used to test spirits: If joy was absent from something, she didn’t trust it.
Seeley doesn’t ignore the harsh truths that accompany this particular form of dementia: the inability to recognize even the most beloved family member, the aphasia that steals coherence from speech, the violent agitation in the gentlest of men and women. For many people, the thought of being stricken with this progressive brain disorder is terrifying.
Yet Seeley’s homage offers one great comfort. Even on her sister’s worst day, Seeley often detected God’s presence in her. She still prayed, she asked God to bless at least two of the medical staff, she still said in a clear voice, when driving by her red brick parish church, “Dear Jesus, we love you.” Once after “a long evening filled with confusion and anger,” one of her daughters hugged her. “Her reward was a Sign of the Cross, traced on her forehead. ‘I love you, my Maria. God be with you!’ It was the first time in weeks her mother had voiced my niece’s name.”
Alzheimer’s is “the long goodbye” to the separation of body and soul, yet that light in Seeley’s sister at the end of her days shone from a source outside the flesh. This is the “sunlight through stained glass,” this light of God which pierces a gathering darkness. “What redeemed those days of suffering was the radiance of God’s grace—sometimes fierce, sometimes dim, but shining throughout. At journey’s end, it blazed up brilliantly, as the lights of ailing brain and body flickered and blinked out for good.”
Seeley’s finely wrought tribute to her sister reflects the goodness and beauty of the woman herself. Through this recollection Seeley particularly spotlights two virtues, gratitude and joy, which are so central to a good life but which often go missing in today’s culture.
Most lovely as well is the circling back of these virtues from the children to their mother. From her they had learned gratitude, joy, and caring for others, and now they were repaying her. “Always, I was amazed by the patient grace of those—her husband, her children—who were dealing with hallucinations, agitation, and a strong will now unfettered from reason.”
Moreover, the woman who so often wished God’s blessings on others had inculcated that lovely habit into her children and grandchildren. That circle of giving and getting love remained strong throughout the family’s ordeal, and by example urges the rest of us to love Our creator and one another and so build our own circles of love.
Here was a woman who put her hand in the hand of God decades before she was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. That disease destroyed memory, reason, and finally consciousness, yet her sister, we gather from Seeley, never let go of God’s hand.
Beautiful.
Jeff Minick is a father of four and grandfather to many. A former history, literature, and Latin teacher, Jeff now writes prolifically for The Epoch Times, American Essence Magazine, and his Substack.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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