Wednesday November 17, 2004
Sentimental attachments To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
We have a pair of conch shells in our spare bathroom. Their inner lining of mother-of-pearl glows a soft pink. When I hold a shell to my ear, I can hear in its fluted coils the roar of distant surf, and I remember once more the waves lapping on a white sand beach off the Caribbean nation of Belize.
That shell is quite useless to me. But I can\’t throw it out. I have a sentimental attachment to it.
An acquaintance treats anything sentimental with ill-disguised contempt. He considers sentiment irrational and unrealistic. He sees no reason to keep a useless and impractical souvenir just because it reminds him of a happy holiday.
Sentimentality is wasted emotion, he suggests.
Then I think of my friends. They\’ve been married for 43 years. The husband is dying of cancer. He\’s a mere shell of the man he once was. Over the last year, he\’s lost 50 pounds. I used to have trouble putting my arms around him to give him a hug – now he has shrunk so much that my arms can overlap behind his back. He shuffles uncertainly from room to room. He\’s too tired to read, to watch TV, to pay attention to conversations…
And his wife cares for him. Night and day, around the clock.
As he sits in his easy chair, eyes wide open, head facing straight ahead, not seeing anything, not reacting to anything, she bends down and gently kisses him.
She got less than an hour\’s sleep the previous night, because he had diarrhea. Several times. He didn\’t get to the bathroom on time. Any of the times. She has done eleven loads of laundry in the last 24 hours.
In any practical terms, he is useless to her. Indeed, he is worse than useless, a burden to her.
But she kisses him gently on the top of his head as she goes by.
He is barely more alive than my conch shell. An unsentimental response would plunk him into a nursing home and let paid staff look after him. Even less sentimentally, to take him for a flu shot, expecting that in his weakened condition the almost inevitable short-term reaction to the shot might flower into pneumonia and let him die of natural causes.
There is nothing left to love other than memories of what he used to be, once upon a time.
His body is just a souvenir of happier times.
Once she depended on him. She called him “My rock!” But he can no longer do anything for her.
Still she whispers something in his ear as she tidies his housecoat. And the faintest of smiles illuminates his face.
When my time comes to be old and useless, when I am little more than an empty shell of the body that once brimmed with life, I hope that I too may still have someone around who\’s sentimental enough to kiss the top of my head once in a while.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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