If a picture's worth a thousand words, imagine the wealth that awaits you in a nursing home, among residents who've stashed away many lifetimes' worth of snapshots, just waiting for someone with the time and interest to look at them.

These days, I've been spending hour after hour going through loose photos with a dear friend whom I'll call Anne. For the first few months, we just looked at them as she told me all about each of the people and places pictured -- almost all of the former long gone now that she's almost 94. Then I bought her a pink pigskin photo album and we're now going through her collection very seriously, selecting the best in order to build a photographic life story for her to give to her beloved daughter.

I think Anne enjoys our sessions; she smiles and laughs a lot as we go through the photos, just as she did throughout her life. So far I've found only one snapshot of her looking sad -- probably because, like my own mom, Anne is a woman whose life is perfectly described in a poem by Jan Struther of Mrs. Miniver fame.  Entitled "Biography," this poem invites its readers to just say this of her life once she’s dead and gone: “‘Here lies one doubly blest.’ Say, ‘She was happy.’ Say, ‘She knew it.’”

There's no doubt that Anne has led a very happy life, and remembering the specifics helps her to count her blessings once again. 

But I suspect that I'm the recipient of the greatest blessings from the time we spend togehter. Anne is easily old enough to be my mother, and her daughter is my age, so seeing her photos is like peering back at my own family's history, and my own deleriously happy childhood. I am especially crazy about those shot in the 1950s, featuring all that mid-century modern decor, all those women dressed in neatly fitted dresses, stockings, heels, hats and gloves for any special occasion -- even lunch out with the girls.

Anne isn't the first of my nursing-home friends to take me on a photographic tour of a life well-lived, and she may not be the last. But I have to say that our time together has been one of the highlights of my almost 14-year volunteer career, and I'll be forever grateful to her.
 
If you visit elderly friends -- especially shut-ins -- don't pass up this wonderful opportunity to share the joys and sorrows of their lives with them. I guarantee that a great time will be had by all!

There’s nothing new under the sun, King Solomon assured his readers in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.  And indeed, stories of children rebelling against, abusing and abandoning their parents seem to be almost as old as time. 
 
“Honor your father and mother …” may be the fifth of the Lord’s commandments delivered in Exodus 20, but it’s the first to instruct us on our relationships with each other, rather than with Him. 
 
Does that imply that it’s more important than His commandments against murdering, committing adultery, stealing, lying, and coveting? Or might it imply that it’s foundational to commandments six through ten? 
 
“Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength fails.” 
 
This petition from King David’s Psalm 71 was directed at God Himself, but it could have been addressed by an elderly parent to his or her children. And it’s a common plea today, even if it’s often left unspoken by parents who have learned that it does no good, and may even turn indifference into hostility. 
 
In some cases, these mothers and fathers are still living on their own; in others, they’re kenneled in facilities where not even the most loving staff can make up for a family’s neglect. The common denominator: an unmet longing to be included in the lives of children and grandchildren who acknowledge them only on special occasions. 
 
And it can get worse: Some children have nothing to do with their parents; they refuse to even send a card at Christmas, or call to acknowledge a milestone birthday. This may seem unbelievable, but check it out: There are a growing number of books and websites out there to help abandoned parents cope with this loss.  
 
Psychiatrists have even given it a name: “Parental alienation syndrome.” It often seems to follow in the wake of divorce, but not always; sometimes we kids are just too wrapped up in our own lives to be bothered with mothers or fathers who have outlived their usefulness.

“In the last days, perilous times will come.” 
 
In his second letter to his protégé Timothy, the apostle Paul listed 18 characteristics of people in earth’s dangerous last days. Here are the first six: “lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents.” 
 
Disobedient to parents?
 
Think that means only those out-of-control kids at the next table at your favorite restaurant? Or might it also refer to children of all ages who treat their parents with disrespect and disobedience? 
 
And, increasingly, with something more chilling than disrespect and disobedience, more chilling even than neglect and abandonment. Witness the rapid growth of elderly euthanasia in Europe; we’re already seeing the early stages of it in the United States. 
 
Of course, active euthanasia is only needed for those stubborn old folk who linger on and on, refusing to die. For the rest, there’s always the withholding of medical care.
 
In fact, the U.S. government has just announced new cuts in Medicare reimbursements for the 30% of senior citizens enrolled in Medicare “Advantage” plans administered by private insurers. Higher co-pays and fewer benefits are on the way for senior Americans. And it’s not difficult to see that reimbursement cuts will lead to even more doctors opting out of accepting Medicare patients – this, just as the elderly population begins to swell with the arrival of us Baby Boomers.
 
Lower supply and higher demand ordinarily means higher prices. But not when Uncle Sam has slapped on price controls and the demand is unrelenting; in that case, the supply will suffer, both in quantity and quality. 
  
“Even to your old age, I am He.”

 One thing has not changed, however, and will never change. 
 
“Even to your old age, I am He,” the prophet Isaiah quotes the Lord as saying in chapter 46 of his Old Testament book. “And even to gray hairs I will carry you! I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.”
 
The God who created this universe and everything in it has always been our only hope. A fair proportion of today’s nursing-home population acknowledges this fact; I have run into relatively few who deny Him entirely, anyway.
 
But I tremble to think what the situation will be a decade or two from now, as the newly elderly take their place, with relatively few even certain of His existence, and their children and grandchildren living in blissful ignorance of the divine command to honor their parents.  
 
In Galatians 6, the apostle Paul warned, “whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” Perhaps there’s an application here for today’s parents: If you want your children to  acknowledge you in your old age, it would be wise to sow the word of God in their hearts today.

What an outstanding account of what a son has done to reach his father, who is suffering from dementia. What joyful long-term memories can we tap in the hearts of the elderly people we know?

This is a picture of my Granny, snapped sometime in the 1950s. She would have been in her mid to late 60s then -- just a few years older than I am now. 

Meta Foth wasn't a beauty by today's standards, was she? Overweight from all that good German food, wearing powerful glasses to make up for the removal of lenses clouded by cataracts, and owning a "house dress" wardrobe tiny enough to fit into the little closet in her bedroom, right next to mine.

She was no great genius, as far as I know. She had run a florist shop with her husband in their native Germany, and they opened another here in Plymouth, Wis., after immigrating to the Land of Opportunity in the 1920s. But by the time I knew her, she was living with us in Green Bay. She liked her soap operas and her afternoon naps, and greatly enjoyed her weekly bus trips downtown to the restaurant on the top floor of Prange's department store. She was somebody there; the waitresses knew her name (Granny, not Meta) and on those glorious occasions when she took me along, I could tell that they all liked her very much.  

I don't remember her having a great sense of humor, or being one to roll around on the floor to play with her grandkids, either. She was old, after all.

But oh, how I loved her. 

And love her still, of course. She left this earth in 1973, having already buried three of her four children. But I can't wait to see her again in heaven, healthy and happy and finally being every bit as important as the next person, because she is, like everyone else there, a child of the King.

In the meantime, I look in the mirror and see signs of her there, as well as of my dad, one of the three children she buried. It reminds me of the most wonderful childhood, and the most wonderful parents and Granny, anyone could ever want. It's pretty hard to get too upset about wrinkles or jowls or bags when they all point to such happiness long ago -- and, even better, to future joy forevermore.