Hope Chest | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Hope Chest | Previous Challenge Entry
By Kathleen Muldoon
10/25/17
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Hope Chest
For 23 years I rented a room in my landlady Betty’s home. Despite our 22-year age difference, we became good friends. Therefore, when Betty began to decline mentally and physically, it seemed natural that I become her caretaker since her family lived hundreds of miles away. I took early retirement and worked on freelance writing contracts from home that enabled me to be there for her.
As Betty’s Alzheimer disease progressed, however, it became apparent to me that I needed to learn how to best help her. It stressed me to see this once vibrant retired teacher struggle to remember her past and recent life. In addition to spending hours online researching ways to help Betty cope with her memory loss, I also joined a support group of Alzheimer patients’ caretakers. From them I learned strategies designed to pry loose some of her buried memories, particularly by sharing photos and other memorabilia from her past.
I retrieved several family photo albums from Betty’s closet, as well as a scrapbook her niece had made for her 80th birthday. I also made an album from the many photos we’d amassed from our outings over the years. Thus began a ritual of sitting at the kitchen table with Betty each afternoon and my pointing out folks in various photos and naming them. For the most part, Betty commented very little; a few people such as her sister she might recognize in one photo but not in another. Occasionally she would ask me “How are you kin to me?” and when I would reply that I am a friend, she would ask me my name. My heart ached for her loss of self and my loss of her friendship.
One afternoon as I closed a photo album after a particularly nonproductive session, Betty reached out and placed her hand over mine.
“Don’t mind that I don’t know these things,” she said. “They are all safe in my hope chest.”
I remembered that Betty had once explained to me the tradition of girls putting linens and needlework into cedar chests which they hoped someday to bring into their marriages. Betty told me that she and her friends used to jokingly call these their “hopeless chests.” She never married, and I’d not seen a cedar chest among her belongings.
“Where is your hope chest?” I asked.
“At home.”
“Here in this house?”
“No,” Betty replied. “In the mansion.”
As I puzzled over this, Betty went on to quote perfectly John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”
My eyes filled with tears as I pictured Betty’s memories, safe in eternity. I put the albums and scrapbook away and then led Betty to her recliner. As I covered her with her favorite afghan, I sent up a silent prayer that my memory of this incident will await me in a hope chest when I arrive in my room at the mansion.
*Quote from KJV.

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