I never realized until recently, though, that St. Therese of Lisieux (known as the Little Flower - above is a rare photo taken by her sister Celine) also underwent the sadness of watching what she called her father's "great trial" - his suffering with dementia. Shortly after Therese Martin entered the Carmelite Convent - an order of cloistered nuns - to join her sisters, their father Louis Martin, a widower, had a series of paralytic strokes which left him increasingly more confused and disoriented. Over a period of six years he grew progressively worse, enduring hallucinations, memory lapses, slurred speech, and increasing dependence on his relatives who cared for him. Finally he was confined in a mental institution.
Because she was in a cloistered lifestyle, Therese was only able to see her father a few times. However, her relatives kept her up to date on his condition and she often wept privately. She was especially overwhelmed with sorrow when he was moved to the psychiatric hospital. Yet she was also aware that his increasing dependence had one unexpected and poignant blessing. Louis was becoming one of God's precious little ones - those who are meek and gentle, yet spiritually powerful in their very powerlessness. Colleen Carroll Campbell, in her book "My Sisters the Saints," writes,
"Therese... viewed her father's increasing dependence as an avenue to greater intimacy with his loved ones and God. Once a robust man and daily communicant known for his cheerfulness, Louis had started suffering bouts of weeping and taken to covering his head with his handkerchief. He continued to manifest joy amid his pain and personality changes, however, speaking frequently of heaven and reminding his daughters not to pray for his cure but that God's will be done. Even his stay in the psychiatric hospital became an occasion of grace, as Louis labored to inspire other patients, share his food with them, and grow more accustomed to taking orders than giving them. Therese noticed her father losing interest in earthly things and saw God 'flooding him with consolations' even as Louis lost his status and possessions - a purification process she believed God was allowing to make her father more like the suffering Christ. Louis agreed. 'I know why God has sent me this trial,' he said. 'I never had any humiliation in my life; I needed one.'
During his last visit to Therese and her sisters at the convent, Louis had to be wheeled in to see them and struggled to communicate with them. "As he was being wheeled away, a crumpled and childlike Louis raised his eyes and pointed up, managing two last words for his beloved daughters: 'In heaven.'
"For Therese, her father's trial ended not in tragedy but in triumph - union with God....She believed that all Louis's losses and humiliations had refined his soul and made him someone to be admired, not pitied." (Campbell.) Therese had such great strength: "(she) refused to avert her gaze from her father's trial or deny the faith that told her that trial had eternal merit." (Campbell)
Colleen Campbell herself, caught in the devastating grief of her own father's battle with Alzheimer's, was inspired by St. Therese's strength and depth of faith. Colleen also had a very devout father who loved life and his family, and the changes in him tore her soul apart. She journaled, deeply grieving, "I knew Dad has Alzheimer's. I thought I even knew his limitations. But it's never hit me so hard as it has in these past few days how helpless he has become and how much he, and I, have lost....I keep seeing - and feeling - the emptiness of a father who cannot communicate with me. A father who asks me relentlessly about my life but can't absorb my answer. A father who keeps slipping farther and farther into the past, before my existence, where I don't even matter. A father who is only half-there, half-cognizant, half-aware, half-sane."
Colleen's father had devoted his career to defending the vulnerable; he advocated for the mentally handicapped and ministered to the sick and the dying as well as to families undergoing crises and stress. He had always told his children that he loved them, not for what they accomplished, but for who they were as precious individuals. Now it was his children's turn. "Now his condition was challenging me to return that unconditional love, and see the blessing he still could be in my life." Her father had always told her that she was safe in God's hands. Even though he had lost so much intellectually, he still retained his faith. Agonized and inwardly trembling every time that she drove to visit him, he still managed to melt away her defenses when she arrived. For he always greeted her with an enthusiasm that was contagious. She writes -
Colleen's father, in his pure faith, was living the truth of Jesus' words in the Gospel of Matthew:
"Look at the birds of the air: They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?....Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you."
Remembering the gentle St. Therese, who often practiced hidden acts of patient love towards the sisters in her convent, Colleen began to pay more attention to how she interacted with her father. She tried to become more gentle and patient, and softer voiced when he asked the same question dozens of times. She curbed her impatience when he told the same stories over and over. "I found myself rushing less, laughing more, and entering a state of peace around my father that I can only compare to prayer." (Campbell)
Her experience with her father, and her remembering the example of St. Therese, who believed in doing little ordinary acts with great love for everyone, changed Colleen's perception of all God's little ones. Now she could see the great dignity and worth of the millions like him- the demented and disabled, the infirm and frail elderly, the unborn. She says,
"If what I was reading in the Gospels, learning from Therese, and seeing in Dad was true, then our culture has it exactly backward when treating such people as expendable. If productivity, efficiency, and rationality are not the ways God gauges a human person's value, then they are not the ways I should measure it either. If childlike dependence on God is the mark of a great soul, then there are great souls hidden in all sorts of places where the world sees only disability, decay, and despair."
Her father had loved St. John of the Cross, and drawn a black box around these words: "From my observations Christ is to a great extent unknown by those who consider themselves his friends. Because of their extreme self-love they go about seeking him in their own consolations and satisfactions. But they do not seek, out of great love for him, his bitter trials and deaths." Her father had written next to these words, "Perhaps the key to this whole book. When will I buy John's doctrine?" Colleen tried to hold on to her memory of her father's understanding of the value of suffering - of uniting our suffering to Christ's to save souls - as her Dad finally descended into the utter darkness of the last stage of Alzheimer's, a terrifying place where he recognized no one and no longer spoke.
Yet for a few hours he was able to respond the last time that she saw him before he died. During that precious time of three hours, Colleen told her father how much she loved him, told him he was finally going home to Jesus, that it was OK for him to go.
"His eyes grew brighter when I mentioned heaven, and he began gesturing again to the sky....We spent three hours that way, Dad gesturing and me talking. I had not seen him stay awake that long in months....I wheeled him down the hallway near the activity room and hugged him good-bye. As I turned to take a final peek at him over my shoulder, I saw him still looking longingly at me. So I walked back down the hall and knelt down beside him.
"His blue eyes brimmed with tears as I gave him one last kiss. He smiled, opened his arms wide, and managed one parting word for me: 'Joy!'"
When we are in deep despair over the sickness and death of a loved one, the idea of God or Goodness can seem like an abstract theory. Yet our faith - and the faith of our suffering loved ones - can illuminate the way. In our loved ones' dignity, which is not erased by dependence or suffering, we can see their inestimable eternal worth, which does not depend on health, wealth, or even rationality. We can trust that their trial will not end in tragedy but in triumph - the joy of their union with God. And, in our caring for them, we can rediscover in our own souls a greater capacity for patience, tenderness, love, and understanding than we would have thought possible otherwise. We can, in the mystery of God's grace, come closer together than we have ever been or will ever be - until we meet again in the JOY of heaven.