Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 26th January 2025

Dear Friends,

“Approach old age with courage and hope” (Advices and Queries, 29).

I’ve recently visited someone close to me who has dementia.  Courage and hope were not easy to find.  I tried various ways of connecting:  using photographs as prompts, playing music, talking about shared experiences.  There wasn’t much response.

At one point, she was looking very intensely at her coffee cup.  Half-way through eating a piece of toast, she picked it up and stared at it: “What’s this?”  At another point, she seemed to be fascinated by her own hand.

I don’t know if she was frightened by a world that no longer made sense.  Or was she experiencing a sense of astonishment at the world?  When she looked at her own hand, I thought of the line from the Psalms: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

It’s hard to enter into the world of dementia, and perhaps undesirable to try too hard.  Sitting quietly and patiently with her felt – more than anything – like sitting in Meeting for Worship.  At some level I felt I was holding her, or upholding her.  In another way, we were both being held.

When knowledge and memory both seem to be dissolving, what can we hope for?  Perhaps this:  that we can still find a way to “know one another in the things which are eternal”.

Tim

on behalf of the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (Patricia Cockrell, David Hitchin, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus and Theresa Samms )