I’ve written here previously about my mother’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease, which officially began seven years ago but which has likely been going on longer than that. For me, the first visible sign was when she had a hard time reading a children’s book to our youngest son, who was then 3 or 4 years old. Since then, the path has taken her through, among other things, a gradual reduction in her ability to read, tell time, and call up words.
A couple months ago Mom reached the point where the care she was receiving in assisted living was no longer enough, and she needed to move to a memory unit. The progress of the disease since then has been quite visible: Her vocabulary is shrinking, her world is getting smaller. And that’s okay—which is to say, I’m at peace with it. It’s the path she’s on, and our aim is for her journey to be as free of unnecessary suffering as possible.
Through all of it, Mom continues to be one of the more remarkable Alzheimer’s patients I’ve known—and even that my wife’s uncle, a world-renowned neurologist, has seen. Her name is Happy, and as we say in Hebrew, k’shma ken hi—she is true to her name. If the disease can bring out a latent essence in a person, then hers really is grounded in positive energy. Even now, what most lights her up is meeting people she can greet.
At this point, the distinction between physical presence and talking on the phone seems to be getting a little blurry for Mom. And while she cannot perform most tasks that most of us would take for granted, she still has the muscle memory to use the speed dial on her cell phone. Add this to the point of the previous paragraph and the result is that I get about 15 calls a day from her—and so do my brothers. Her little red cell phone is a vital lifeline to the rest of the world, and she is not afraid to use it.
The content of these conversations is more or less the same, lasting usually no more than a minute: a little how are you, a few patches of words that don’t make a tremendous amount of sense, and then, “Ok, we’ll talk again later. I love you so much.” Which is really the point: to paraphrase the great rabbi, Stevie Wonder, She just called to say she loves me.
“Everyone whose heart was moved, and all whose hearts were moved, came and brought to YHVH an offering” (Ex. 35:21). Commenting on this verse, Rabbi Chaim Joseph David Azulai (18th c., land of Israel; known as Chida) observes, “We all know there is a great distance between thought and action, between our good intentions and making them happen. Many good impulses evaporate before they come out into the world. Many people carry within them the burden of thoughts generated by the goodness of their hearts, but which have never been made manifest. Thus the Torah relates that, in the case of the construction of the Mishkan, no one suffered in this way—’everyone whose heart was moved,’ ‘whose spirit was moved,’ made an offering. That is, everyone had an impulse to give—but even those who might normally have found that that impulse remained just an impulse were able to bring their thought into action.”
Accompanying my Mom on her journey has afforded me some new insight into the Chida’s beautiful teaching. Unsurprisingly, the rabbi’s words align with one of my Mom’s own maxims that I remember from childhood. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” was a phrase Mom remembered growing up with. But as a parent, she also added her own inversion as a corollary: “And when you have something nice to say—say it!”
Taken together, I experience both these teachers as reminding me that part of my avodah now, my spiritual and human calling, is to help my Mom express her loving impulses into action—and to do the same for myself. I find that isn’t so much a technical issue as much as it’s about an orientation, a way of approaching her and her journey: Attuning myself to the opportunities and gifts, challenging as they may be at times, present in each moment, each interaction, each one of those many phone calls during the day.
While there may be a particularly localized and intensive dimension to this form of avodah in my relationship with my Mom, I would suggest that it can be a way to understand our general spiritual mission in the world. As much as anything else, this work of enabling the expression of loving impulses through words and deeds, is what building the Mishkan was all about—and it remains our work today.