Holding on to hope.

One day I went to visit my friend Ruth. She was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s disease. She lived alone in the house she had lived in for the past 40 years. Next door to her lived her brother and his wife.

Each morning her sister in law would get her up and dressed and give her her breakfast. After a couple of hours someone came to bring her lunch and again with her evening meal. She saw people a couple of other times during the day and her sister in law came back in the evening to get her ready for bed and tuck her in for the night. She was very well taken care of.

The day I called to see her, I found her sitting in her kitchen looking out the window at the traffic passing by.

“I sit here every day”, she told me, ” waiting for the mailman to come because I hope he will bring me a letter saying that I can drive again.”

She knew she couldn’t drive because her doctors had said it was no longer safe for her to do so. She had been driving for about sixty years and it was really bothering her that she could no longer do so. She missed her independence even though there was always someone available to take her where she wanted to go. It just wasn’t the same as far as she was concerned.

“Do you think he will bring it?” I asked her.

“I don’t know but I hope so” she replied.

We could have reminded her that it wasn’t going to happen and that she would never be able to drive again. What we did was encourage her to keep on waiting for the mailman. We knew we were giving her false hope but, sometimes, it is the kindest thing to do.

To take away that hope would have been devastating to her and what would it have achieved?