Honor Your Father and Your Mother

“Honor your father and your mother, so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life upon the earth” (Ephesians 6:2–3).

With little warning, he came to live with us on February 1, 2022. His living situation had abruptly changed, and he had nowhere else to go. So Sandy brought her 90-year-old father home to our house. Little did we know that we were about to embark on a journey that would last nearly five years.

We had often talked about our aging parents and agreed that, if needed, we would open our home to them. We truly believed in the admonition of the fifth commandment: to honor our fathers and mothers. Indeed, we believed that to honor Jack was to honor our Father in heaven. Be that as it may, we were ill-prepared when this responsibility was thrust upon us.

Everything changed! Now, every decision and every move we made had at its center the call to honor Jack. We came to understand that honoring a 90-year-old parent looks very different from honoring them when we were teenagers still living under their roof.

As we pondered what honor should look like at this stage of Jack’s life, we came to this understanding: to honor him at this time was to ensure that he was safe, warm, fed, and, above all, loved. So we adjusted to this change in our lives and began the process of honoring Jack for the rest of his days on this earth.

What did that look like? In the first couple of years, it meant that where we went, he went, whether it was a trip to Reno or a visit to family in Utah and Idaho. It meant dragging along a CPAP machine, setting it up and taking it down virtually every night of our travels. It meant practicing a good deal of patience because 90-year-olds do everything at a slower pace: eating, walking, dressing, going to the bathroom, and so on.

In many ways, caring for Jack was like raising our children. In a period of seven years, Sandy and I brought four children into the world. From the vantage point of being up to our elbows in diapers, it seemed as if we would never move beyond the Pampers stage of life. But you know what? We did! We now have two married grandchildren, four in college, and four in high school. And from this vantage point, we now wonder how those years passed so quickly.

After two years and nine months of living in our home, Jack’s age related dementia progressed to the point that we had to seek the care offered by a memory care facility. We had been prepared to have Jack live with us until he would one day pass away in his bed at our house. That changed, and the decision to place him in memory care was the most gut-wrenching decision we had ever made in our 55 years of marriage.

After twenty three months of living in a memory care facility, Jack passed away quietly on September 17, 2026. He would have been 95 on November 1.

Looking back over the past four and a half years, there were moments when time seemed to drag as we cared for Jack. But now that those years are behind us, we find ourselves wondering once again, “Where did the time go?” These years have not been easy, yet we have no regrets. We have been obedient to the fifth commandment; we have honored our Father in heaven; we have honored an earthly father. It is well with our souls.