A Care Giver’s Promise – by Ruth A. Tucker

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Bless the Lord who crowns you with tender mercies.

Psalm 103

Waiting for a diagnosis. The hours and days drag on. I’ve experienced the tension of waiting for the results of a biopsy, though I’ve never faced that dreaded word—cancer. But for me, cancer is not my greatest diagnostic fear. Alzheimer’s tops the list? John, assuming he survives me, would be left largely alone with my care. How would he cope? To the very end he cared for Ruth and Myra, his first and second dearly departed wives who both died of cancer. So also, I am confident, he would care for me.

On the back cover of his book A Promise Kept, Robertson McQuilkin is identified first as a homemaker. Most people know him, however, as having served for more than two decades as the president of Columbia International University in Columbia, South Carolina. Much to the chagrin of the university board of trustees, he quit at the height of his career. He quit to become a fulltime homemaker.

In the summer of 1978, McQuilkin and his wife Muriel were visiting friends. Amid their lively conversation, Muriel, then fifty-five, repeated a story she had told only five minutes earlier. That was the first faint hint that there might be something amiss. Three years later during the first year of President Reagan’s tenure in office, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This was long before the disease was widely discussed, long before President Reagan himself would confront that same diagnosis.

McQuilkin’s resignation came twelve years after Muriel’s conversational blunder. She had become agitated, fearful and unhappy unless she was with him. He had not promised the university ‘Til death do us part. To Muriel, however, he had. They spent hours sitting in the garden, taking slow walks, and reading aloud. Five years into his retirement, he reflected on the course their lives had taken:

Seventeen summers ago, Muriel and I began our journey into the twilight. It’s midnight now…  Yet, in her silent world, Muriel is so content, so loveable. If Jesus took her home, how I would miss her gentle, sweet presence.

That gentle presence, however, was at times interrupted by utter frustration. On one occasion before she began wearing diapers, he was in the bathroom trying to clean her up. She was pushing him away, clumsily trying to take care of herself. He told her to stop. She ignored him. In exasperation he slapped the calf of her leg. “She was startled,” he writes. “I was, too. Never in our 44 years of marriage had I even so much as touched her in anger… But now, when she needed me most.”

There was a stretch when McQuilkin feared that he might be heading into his own midnight. On an intellectual level he recognized God was in control, but he was in the depths of pain emotionally and spiritually. “The blows of life,” he later wrote, “had left me numb—my dearest slipping from me, my eldest son snatched away in a tragic accident, my life’s work abandoned at its peak.” He was depressed, his love for God “frozen over.”

But he found his way back not through what could be described as “showers of blessings,” but rather through God’s tender mercies. “Sometimes the happy doesn’t bubble up with joy but rains down gently with tears.”

It was the morning after Valentine’s Day 1995, the anniversary of their marriage engagement. He was exercising on his stationary bicycle at the foot of her bed. She awakened and spoke for the first time in months. Her word was “love,” thrice repeated. He rushed to embrace her, asking “You really do love me, don’t you?” She responded in the affirmative with the only words that came to her enfeebled mind: “I’m nice”—the last words she ever spoke.

A Valentine of tender mercies.

Excerpted from Tender Mercies – 52 Weekly Meditations, by Ruth A. Tucker. Coming soon at www.ptm.org/books.