Your Kindness May Kill Her!

You may change when something happens that alters her life and so draws the family's sympathy toward her. Until that moment she was happy: she had done with her life what contented her, even if it did not convince you. Then, suddenly, she tripped on the edge of the carpet and fell, and her leg or her forearm was broken; or she was stricken with a weakness in which the doctor could not help. The family had been thinking of it for some time: "We always expected this" — so everyone whispers. And there begins, without any intent, her exclusion from the family gatherings and her deprivation of the pleasant talks: she has no share in what passes among the women as they sip their morning coffee, or in the evening before the men come home from their work. And if she herself is the subject, the talk stops the moment she appears at the door of the room, and it becomes clear to her that she is the one being spoken of. Then there comes back to her that feeling she had as a child, when the little girls among her playmates gossiped about her; and soon she perceives that she has been put out of the family's magic circle. For you are now living upon her, and not with her — and beware of that, for it forges for her a chain of loneliness and tedium.

What are you weaving in secret from her? She does not know. You devise a plan she would like to be told of, and your intention is to help her; and so you change her surroundings. She has always slept in a room on the upper floor, but the doctor has forbidden her to climb the stairs — lest she be deprived of the views surrounding her room. The room on the ground floor faces the wall of the neighbors' house, and it is smaller than her own room; so you laugh to yourself that you have got rid of the big bed, because it does not suit the size of the room; and likewise you replace some of the furniture that has kept her company; and someone criticizes her taste in the choice of the picture hung opposite her bed. This criticism of her taste, and then her separation from her furnishings, tell heavily upon her spirit. But you will not stop here in crushing her: she feels that her room has gone under, and that in its place has risen something new that does not please her; and so she cannot find her things easily, and she cannot settle.

If she lives alone, you may persuade her to come and share your home. A friend told me that she managed to draw her father into living with her and her husband; by leaving his house he gave up all the habits that had kept him company alongside his friends, and he fell into a constant unease. The couple noticed that he excused himself most evenings to spend a few hours outside. Where did he go? It was a mystery. And one night the husband followed him, and found him sitting in a café, smoking and talking with a friend, happiness brimming from his face — whereas his state changed completely in the elegant house. And here his daughter began to wonder whether her kindness had crushed the peace in her father's soul.

Here is a lady advanced in years who prefers to live by herself, but it delights her that her grandson should visit her for a few days, spending with her a spell during which she cares for him and enjoys his company. You think of sparing her hardships, and so you do not consult her on what touches the family's problems. Do you feed little Sami separately? Or does he share the family table?... This is a demolition of her spirit. She has been used to bearing responsibility, and if you strip her of it suddenly, it is as though you lifted a person from the bottom of the sea to its surface in the twinkling of an eye — and the change in pressure leads to destruction.

If you refresh her body, you are attacking her soul — as when you say: "Poor thing, she no longer remembers; her mind is not what it was." And you ignore the fact that you yourself forget very often, and that in some matters she remains more alert than any of you. But she has no way to prove it.

A simple remark sometimes kills the old woman:

"Mother, things have changed, and the outlook of the children of this age contradicts your ideas." Yes, that is true — but have you forgotten that most of your knowledge is built upon her experience? You have now finished changing her life and shaking her confidence, and before you lies one more task to finish her off: to direct all her thinking toward her bodily infirmity. These are facts she has accepted, but which she tries to forget. "I am sorry my hand trembles" — so a respected lady said to me as she handed me a piece of sweets. Naturally her friends overlook it; but you and I dwell on her weakness: "Let me do this work instead of you. You ought to keep to your bed at such an hour." And so the poor woman's thoughts turn toward her helplessness and weakness instead of toward the amusement she would have had.

The lady's name has faded away behind the title her grandson calls her by. I know a friend who had her first name engraved in letters of gold on the cover of her Bible, and who was displeased with anyone who did not call her by that name. It means a great deal to her: it is the name she was known by in the days of her youth, the whisper that sprang from between her beloved's lips — it is her very self; and its fading away means her spirit's destruction. And who knows? Those who live around her may be working to efface it little by little — and that means not hardness of heart, but a failure of imagination, and the tyranny of kindness and affection!