I’m so tired of this, the man thought as he slowly wrote yet another return address on yet another form for yet another bill that wasn’t his own. The pile of paperwork was enormous. Electricity. Propane. Telephone. Internet. Magazine subscriptions. The cable company and the town hall. The accountant and the broker and the lawyer. And so many insurance companies.
One change-of-address form after another, each requiring the same information: his father’s name and then the man’s own name and address. And between the two names, just three little words: in care of.
The man had been slogging through his days for many months, bearing the burdens of his own life on his shoulders, as well as the great weight of his elderly father’s dwindling life. Nine decades of sheer living and a new and creeping dementia had hobbled the man’s father, and the older man needed his son’s help now more than ever.
In care of. In care of. In care of…
It wasn’t that the man didn’t want to help take care of his father. He loved his dad and he shouldered the new weight with a great sense of honor and determination. But even great love is heavy at times, and even devotion can have a weary toil.
The man pushed his chair back from his desk, taking a break between change-of-address forms. Stretching the cramps out of the fingers on his writing hand. Thinking about family: his aging father, his own grown children, and his new granddaughters.
And as the man stared at the ceiling, looking back in time and then ahead toward the unknowable future, a scene began to play out in his tired mind.
It was last summer again and the man had taken his wife and family down to the lake for a swim and a picnic. The man had dawdled at the back of his car for a few moments, rummaging for towels, and when he turned toward the lake he saw his son and granddaughter standing by the edge of the road, waiting for a safe moment to cross to get to the excitement of the bright sunshine and the hot sand and the cool water and the eager mallards.
Father and daughter. A little hand wrapped in a big hand. Father alert, wary, looking both ways for a break in the inherent danger. Daughter twitching and hopping in place, oblivious and looking only straight ahead toward the happy promise of the waves.
At the safe moment, the pair began to cross, and the man heard his granddaughter giggle and saw her feet fly off the ground in a series of little skips. In those same moments, as the exuberant weight of a dangling three-year-old began the joyous tugging, the man watched his son almost imperceptibly lean away from the load, pulling just a little harder to keep his daughter airborne and avoid a skinned knee.
“He takes such good care of her,” the man had said to his wife.
And the weary man in his winter chair looked past the piles of his father’s bills and out the window into a grey sky filled with greasy snow; and he saw himself watching the road-crossing on that distant summer day. And he remembered that he had been surprised that the sudden weight of one small granddaughter had not pulled her father down, but rather that she had been lifted up.
It was just a matter of perspective, the man realized. His son had been prepared for the sudden yank of a toddler, was ready for the responsibility and the extra load, and was happy to bear it. A burden borne is also a burden lifted. One stumbles, and another catches. One drops, and another carries. And, strangely, sometimes the one who carries bears the lighter load.
And quietly the man remembered something else, the amazing grace and strength and comfort of the ages: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
The man pulled himself back to his desk and drew yet another form toward himself and on the allotted line he wrote his father’s name. And then, with glistening eyes and fresh vigor, he leaned away from the load and wrote again those three little words: in care of.