‘Please Stay With Me’

Rebecca Frech has a moving article, a lesson for many, on the National Catholic Register website.  I could easily identify with it having left my mother on Sundays in the care of another lady so I could attend an earlier low Mass alone. This other lady would take my mother to the later high Mass. God forgive me. Now, at the age of sixty-three, I need a walker and can barely get around. Mom always was able to take care of herself (with my sister’s help), even after a severe heart attack, until she died of a stroke at the age of eighty-three.

Rebecca Frech: The people in front of us scooted over in the handicapped pew in Mass this morning  to make room for a tiny, stooped, elderly woman with a walker. Her daughter guided her carefully to the front of the church and moved the walker out of the way.  The people in the pew started to move down further so that she could sit when she turned to leave.

The Mother’s arthritic hand fluttered outward in the direction of her middle-aged child, and her faint whisper of a voice said, “Please stay with me.” Read full article here.