A “most beautiful and wondrous and moving thing”

In case you missed it when it first appeared in Meridian Magazine, the Interpreter Foundation — it wasn’t my idea! — has reposted my article “Brigham Young, Race, and Slavery: Reexamining Utah’s 1852 Service Act” on its blog.

And here’s a five-minute video from Christopher Blythe at BYU:  “Tim Ballard, Blood Libel, and Anti-Mormonism”

I’m currently reading a book entitled Threshold: Terminal Lucidity and the Border of Life and Death, written by Alexander Batthyány.  Prof. Batthyány holds the Viktor Frankl Chair for Philosophy and Psychology at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein and is Director of the newly-established Research Institute for Theoretical Psychology and Personalist Studies at Pázmány University, Budapest.  Since 2012, Dr. Batthyány has been Visiting Professor for existential psychotherapy at the Moscow University Institute of Psychoanalysis, in Russia. He is also Director of the Viktor Frankl Institute and the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna and first editor of the 14-volume edition of the Collected Works of Viktor Frankl.

I want to share one of the stories that Dr. Batthyány relates in Threshold.  This particular narrative comes out of Switzerland:

My grandmother had suffered from Alzheimer’s dementia for several years. Putting her under the care of a nursing home was a difficult decision for all of us, especially for the man of her life, whom she’d been married to for more than sixty years—but at some point, looking after her at home simply exceeded the strength of this old man, who was devoted to his wife. In the final stages of her illness, nothing much seemed to remain of the grandmother I knew and loved. At first, she could no longer recognize us. Eventually, she stopped speaking altogether and had to be fed, because she was no longer capable of eating unaided. My grandfather nonetheless called on her every day: one visit in the morning and one in the afternoon. Our family went to see my grandmother every Sunday. Truth be told, we didn’t so much visit my grandmother as support my grandfather those Sundays. On the day “the miracle” happened, we reached the door, knocked, entered the room—and saw how my grandfather lovingly held my grandmother’s hand and, yes, spoke to her! At first, we just didn’t trust our eyes and ears. But then my grandmother looked at us one by one (all five of us). Her large, beautiful eyes were perfectly clear. The haze of oblivion, of apathy, the “dead gaze” had given way to an expression of limpid vitality. Like bright water. I cannot think of a better image. She who hadn’t recognized us for a year, who hadn’t even reacted when we visited her, addressed every one of us by name. She who’d removed her hand when we wanted to take it, presumably on reflex. On that day, however, my grandmother said in plain, clear German that she was glad to “be back,” and to see us.

Then she looked lovingly at her husband, my grandfather, and asked us to take good care of him. She said it was no good him being alone in the big house (my grandfather then lived in the large house that was my mother’s childhood home) and that he needed domestic help. When we said that he had recently hired a housekeeper, she simply said: “Yes, but you could have told me!” (We hadn’t done so, because talking to, let alone with, her only a day prior would have been unthinkable.) However, now she clearly understood and was reassured. She took his hand. I saw my grandfather’s face—thick tears were running down his cheeks. Between sobs, he barely managed to say: “I love you.” And she answered: “I love you!” And her gaze … I myself weep as I write this down, because I can see the clarity, urgency, and love her eyes expressed that day as clearly as if I could see them now.

This conversation lasted some twenty or thirty minutes. Then my grandmother lay back and soon fell asleep. We stayed at her bedside for another half hour or so, until the end of visiting time. None of us talked when we left. My grandfather linked arms with me as we walked out, but he tore away from me after a few meters and turned back in the corridor of the nursing home, because he wanted to kiss his wife once more. It was to be for the last time. When the phone rang the next morning, I knew before picking up what the ward nurse was going to tell us. My grandmother had died peacefully in her sleep, at the age of eighty-six. It was one of the most beautiful and wondrous and moving things I have witnessed to this day. (7-8)

My attention was drawn to Prof. Batthyány’s book by a very positive review of it that was written by Charles Murray for the Wall Street Journal.  It caught my eye not only because of the intrinsic interest to me of its subject but because we have a case of “terminal lucidity” in my wife’s family.  Her paternal grandmother suffered from severe dementia for several years prior to her death.  On the last occasion that my wife and I saw her, during a home visit from Cairo, where we were living at the time, she was completely unresponsive and was curled up on her side in fetal position.  (We immediately began to pray for her to pass away soon — a prayer that was answered fairly quickly.) And yet, almost immediately before her passing, one of her sons — my wife’s uncle, now himself deceased, who was visiting Utah from his home in Texas — reported enjoying a clear and substantial conversation with her.  I have no reason to doubt his report, partly because I’ve personally heard of other, similar, cases.

Do any of you out there have an experience of this kind in your family or among your acquaintances?

Posted from Park City, Utah