Introduction

Jim, Beth, Bob, and Bonnie all asked me the same question at separate times: "What book are you writing now?" Flattered by their interest,  I answered, "Tentatively, it's title When Our Parents Need Us Most or When Our Parents Grow Old." Their common response took me by surprise. With just the slightest variation in words, each of them pleaded, "Finish it soon. I need it now."

   Jim, the president of a publishing company, in his early fifties, went on to explain that he and his wife were trying to delay the decision to move an eighty-two-year-old mother into a nursing home.

   Beth, almost forty and an administrative assistant to a college president, reported being at a loss in trying to counsel her mother, who felt torn between her responsibilities to her husband at home and her own mother, who had fallen and broken her hip in a distant city.

   Bob, mid-forties and the vice-president of a theological seminary, told of his thwarted desire to show his love for a non-Christian father whose lung cancer had spread so that the terminal diagnosis had been shortened to a matter of days.

   Bonnie, wife of a physician and not yet fifty, said that her husband treated deadly diseases, but none of them compared to the Alzheimer's that had reduced her mother a zombie four years ago.

   Behind these real-life dilemmas is the sobering fact that we are entering an era which the increasing life span of our parents is creating a crisis of caregiving for adult children. Admittedly, we are not ready for this new level of responsibility with all the changing  dynamics of medical breakthroughs, life support systems, nursing homes, living wills, Medicaid, and Medicare. Our readiness to respond is even more limited by the fact that we have not been forced to consider these changes from a biblical point of view. Yet, like Jim, Beth, Bob, and Bonnie, we want to put contemporary meaning to

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God's commandment to "Honor your father and mother." What does it really mean for us, as caregivers, to honor our aging parents in the name of Christ?

   This book is a hindsight search for biblical principles children of aging parents can follow as Christian caregivers. I say hindsight because my wife and I have been through multiple crises of care with our four aging parents, two of whom died in their sixties and two of whom lived into their nineties. Although the insights of our experience may be highly personalized and nonprofessional, they are honest expressions of our deepest love and lingering hurt. So, to all sons and daughters of aging parents whose phones will inevitably ring with news of crisis, I invite you to join me in the search for the biblical principles and the Christlike spirit that will qualify us as caregivers who honor our parents and please God.

David L. McKenna

Chapter One  ||  Table of Contents