Is Rest Really Reprehensible

My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices; *
my body also shall rest in hope.
Psalm 16


Margaret, my well-beloved cousin (once-removed) is eighty-nine years old. She inherited both a cheerful and generous disposition and weak ankles from her father. Her ankles far sag inward under her considerable weight. Because of this, for several years now she has simply slid her feet forward a few inches at a time instead of picking them up when she walks. She feels more and more unsteady as she ages and fears a fall, of which she has had several already. Fortunately, her substantial padding and her penchant for falling in flowerbeds rather than the sidewalk has saved her from injury so far.
Margaret’s driver’s license was up for renewal on her last birthday. Unsure of herself behind the wheel, she asked the inspector at the Highway Department if he thought she ought to renew her driver’s license, which would expire when she was ninety-nine.
The man took a deep breath. He had obviously been faced with dilemma before. He tapped his clipboard against his leg, stalling. Finally he said, “Well, can you turn your head to look over your shoulder?”
Margaret tried the maneuver. She could turn her chin almost to her shoulder but no farther.
“So,” she tells me during our regular morning phone call the next day, “I decided the Lord was using that to tell me I ought to give up driving.”
I breathe a silent prayer of thanks.
The Lord plays a large part in Margaret’s array of ways for coping with aging. Margaret watched my mother decline into dementia seven years ago. Like most of us, Margaret fears the possibility of facing that same fate. She consoles herself thus: “I just pray the Lord comes again before I lose my mind.”
When the Lord intervened in her drivers license renewal, Cousin Margaret’s family and friends, whatever their spiritual standing, praised Margaret’s Lord for his foresight. They no longer have to worry about her endangering her life and that of others on the highway.
Another benefit accrued to Margaret after the sacrifice of her driver’s license. She found herself officially eligible for Medicare services to the housebound. Her doctor, concerned about her unsteadiness, prescribed a round of physical therapy for her.
Alice comes twice a week to help Margaret improve her walking – or as the professionals call it, “gait training.” Alice and Margaret have worked up to a half dozen laps across Margaret’s living room.
“I’m done in,” she tells me, following one of Alice’s visits. “And sore. It takes me the whole next day just to get over the therapy.”
I thought about that and a question concerning aging formed in my mind: When should an old person, especially one as old as Margaret, be allowed to just give up? When should we, family and so-called health care professionals alike, stop pestering them to keep on going, improving their gait or watching their diet or broadening their interests and just let them be. Let them, blessed state, rest?
Old people used to be allowed to retire to their rocking chairs and watch the world go by. After a lifetime of toil and trouble, few rockers felt a compulsion to keep up with the increasing speed of that world that went by without them.
Yes, Margaret may get a few more weeks or even months of mobility from her physical therapy. But as soon as the physical therapy runs out, I feel certain she will return to her old shuffling ways. And why shouldn’t she? When you’re eighty-nine years old and have to haul two hundred and seventy-five pounds around on weak ankles, you should get a prize simply for managing to shuffle.
So why do we try to keep people from quitting when it’s perfectly obvious they’re tired and ready to rock? Why isn’t quitting a perfectly reasonable option? Why do we make quitting sound like a moral failing?
Our objections are not really for the benefit of the weary quitter, I’m afraid. I think we insist out of fear. Our uneasiness arises from two different sources. For one, fear that we haven’t done all we might for our loved ones if we don’t keep badgering them to try harder. The other source is horror at imagining ourselves in their diminishing condition. If we can keep the shufflers picking up their feet in a sprightly gait, if the Margarets in our lives can keep putting one foot in front of the other, it enhances our own chances of remaining active and vigorous in our old age.
But there’s a limit to vigor and a pleasure in rest.