Her name was Louise

One of my dear friends is the Rev. Pat Meyers. Now retired and living in Delaware, I first met Pat when she served as the dynamic pastor of an inner-city church in Pontiac, Mich., doing some incredible work serving the least and the last and the lost. She's also a powerful advocate for not just doing acts of mercy, but acting on social justice issues, too.

Pat's also a very good writer. From time to time, she sends out these wonderful e-mails about life. This past weekend, Pat sent our group the note, below. With her permission, I share it with you, unedited, below.

"Her name was Louise and she died on Friday, January 22 at the age of 102 and a few weeks. She lived in the nursing home next door to my mother. While mother was in the bathroom at the end of our visit, I would spend time with Louise. Now I pace the hall and wait. I miss her.

"Louise worked for a wealthy man and married him. He died decades ago. She was the oldest of several children. Her younger brother, George, turned 100 last summer and died in the fall. She has three younger brothers, the youngest of whom is 80, and they visited her faithfully every Thursday bringing her fresh flowers. She also had a niece who often came to visit. She always made sure that she had a bath, got her hair washed and set, and sat up in her chair to visit with them. Sometimes it tired her so much she was in bed for the rest of that day and the next, but she always snapped back.

"Louise was 99% stone deaf. On a good day, she caught half of what I said in my deepest voice with my knees touching hers. On a bad day, I either yelled into her right ear or wrote on a pad. I also used hand signals to tell her what the weather was doing or the temperature. Mostly I just let her talk. She would laugh and take my hand. During the last few months she even had trouble reading. Her hands were crippled; she had a TV with closed captioning but the words moved too fast for her to read them. She was so lonely that her eyes would literally light-up when she saw me enter her room. She knew I would only be there a few minutes, but she was glad to see me.

"She landed in the nursing home five years ago because she fell in her yard at the age of 97 while raking leaves and laid there for at least eight hours until a neighbor realized that something was wrong. The brothers intervened and she hated every day she was there.

"I discovered that she was a United Methodist. She and her mother had attended a wooden church, long gone now, and then a church still very active. I never saw a pastor visit her; she never mentioned anyone. At some point, either she drifted away from them or they lost her. She died alone, after three days of refusing to get up; she did have an oxygen supply. They checked on her at 7:30am and she refused to rise. They checked again at 7:55am, and she was dead. On Monday, as I left her room, I said as I always did as I took her hand, "See you tomorrow." It was not to be.

"Louise and I had one major disagreement, and she knew that I disapproved. She called African Americans "coloreds." Her brothers told her that "coloreds" had moved next door to her main house, and she was very upset. She also had people of color caring for her, and this upset her as well. She asked me if I agreed with her, and I told her I did not.

"This is the point of my story about Louise. How could a woman who was a United Methodist for more than a century, attending church literally in the cradle where the denomination was born, come to the point where she hated people of color? How is it that no pastor or teacher ever urged her to move beyond that point of thinking?

"I believe, because I choose to believe, that Louise is with God. I also choose to believe that Louise now understands how her hatred of people of color was so out of line with what God intended for creation. Yet she spent all of those years upset and angry when her own church did not teach her differently.

"And as a side bar, we wonder why the United Methodist Church in this area is struggling so terribly? Could it be because we are not challenging our people to be faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ?"

Blessings and Peace,
Pat Meyers