Supplements

Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Part of the Living Body of Christ

How do you live out your respect for life? Since October is “Respect Life Month,” I’ve been giving some thought to the various ways life can be respected or disrespected (if that’s a word). For instance, we talk about the sanctity of human life from womb to tomb, but let’s put that in specific and personal terms.

When mother lived at the Meredith Home, which she loved, she always sat at the same table for lunch with the same people. On occasion toward the end of her stay there, I would visit to make sure she remembered to go to lunch and where she sat. On those occasions, she would open her silverware and find a serving spoon among her utensils, and she really didn’t want it. At this point in her life, she found no problem in sailing it across the table away from her place. When I was there, or my sister, we would race to the utensils, unwrap them and pull the serving spoon from the mix so that she wouldn’t toss it. We eventually remembered to ask the folks who set the tables to leave that spoon out of her utensils.

We didn’t get too excited about it, and neither did she. It’s so easy to lose patience with older people, especially if they tell the same stories over and over or ask the same question almost as soon as you finish answering it. However, this is a time when maintaining and showing respect for that older person can set the stage for your own future when our children will most assuredly become our parents as our minds dim and memories fade. If our children and other young people see us treating our elders with respect, care and love, we have a much better chance of being treated that way ourselves.

In the same way, we need to review how we treat people with mental or physical disabilities. It’s always easier to show deference and respect for someone with physical disabilities because we can see that something is wrong. Families caring for someone with mental disabilities suffer in additional ways because rarely does anyone outside see or realize the additional stress on caregivers. And let’s face it, we might have a hard time respecting someone who, during a manic phase, doesn’t sleep or rest for hours on end, and then later, sleeps for days at a time. If we’re trying to care for someone on that kind of roller coaster, it’s hard to maintain any kind of perspective, much less respect that person for who he or she is.

But we have to keep trying, don’t we? Respect is a core value that doesn’t get the amount of attention or discussion that it deserves. So much that’s wrong in our families, our communities and our world could be put right if we all shared a common respect, beginning with life itself — all of life with its twists and turns, its wonderfully rewarding times and its tough times too. By facing life, living it and sharing it we become more and more members of the living Body of Christ.