No Boy Knows

My parents are going through a very difficult adjustment. Both are 82 years old and moving past the ability to live on their own. My mom has been suffering from Alzheimer's disease and we decided to place her into assisted living. My dad was toughing it out by living by himself, sort of. Actually one of my sisters has been visiting them in their home from once a week to fairly frequently for the past few years. And then my dad got pneumonia that put him into the hospital. With antibiotics and fluids he had pulled through. But because his "cold" lingers he also was placed into assisted living by the doctor's orders. And to complicate things Parkinson's disease makes it difficult for him to swallow correctly possible asperating on food or water making a relapse of pneumonia likely.

This has been a trying time for all of us. I've never before felt the frailty of man and such sorrow. But John Adams was quoted as saying, "Genius is sorrow's child." We'll see if he was right if some genius will spring forth.

While my dad seems to be recovering from pneumonia my mom is living a confusing and frightening life right now. I'm finding that she may have a bad dream or imagine some horrible possibility and her mind cannot distinguish the imaginary from the reality, the dream-world from the awake-world. One thing I know is she has a firm grip on her faith in Christ that has been grounded since her youth. We had a wonderful time together as I read to her some Proverbs, or some Psalms, or something from Matthew. She recited the entire 23 Psalm, with only a little help from me. And I would just listen to her as she would reminisce and I would marvel at the life she led.

While assisted living places are nice in that they take care of so many duties my mom finds it hard to find peace and quiet and so that the additional noise of the night staff makes it hard to sleep. I talked to her one morning and asked when she got to sleep last night and she said, "I don't know, I'm not sure. There's a poem that says, 'No man knows when he goes to sleep.'"

To see a mother decline in this way is difficult to experience. She has fears, and she cries, and along with it all she has chronic back pain. I tell you, this sort of thing shapes and molds a man and in the process squeezes tears out of him.

I promised I'd look up that poem on the Internet and read it to her the next chance I get. The title is actually "No Boy Knows". Read it and you'll see it's really great.

By James Whitcomb Riley

There are many things that boys may know
Why this and that are thus and so,
Who made the world in the dark and lit
The great sun up to lighten it:
Boys know new things everyday
When they study, or when they play,
When they idle, or sow and reap,
But no boy knows when he goes to sleep.

Boys who listen or should at least
May know that the round old earth rolls East;
And know that the ice and the snow and the rain
Ever repeating their parts again
Are all just water the sunbeams first
Sip from the earth in their endless thirst
and pour again till the low stream leap,
But no boy knows when he goes to sleep.

A boy may know what a long glad while
It has been to him since the dawn’s first smile,
When forth he feared in the realm divine,
Of brook-laced woodland and spun-sunshine,
He may know each call of his truant mates,
And the paths they went, and the pasture gates,
Of the cross-lots home through the dusk so deep,
But no boy knows when he goes to sleep.

Oh I have followed me, o’er and o’er,
From the flagrant drowse on the parlor floor,
To the pleading voice of the mother when
I even doubted I heard it then,
To the sense of a kiss, and a moonlit room,
And dewy odors of locust-bloom,
A sweet white-cot and a cricket’s cheep,
But no boy knows when he goes to sleep.